Fri 5 Mar 2010
TREAD SOFTLY STRANGER. Renown Pictures, UK, 1958. Diana Dors, George Baker, Terence Morgan, Patrick Allen, Jane Griffiths, Joseph Tomelty. Based on the play “Blind Alley” by Jack Popplewell. Director: Gordon Parry.
Although not a perfect film noir, this one, made in England toward the end of the original noir era, comes very very close. In terms of images, including that of Diana Dors’ character who acts as the catalyst in sending the lives of two brothers headlong into disaster; a soundtrack that includes the constant throbbing of the industrial town where all three live, day and night; and a story with more than enough twists and turns to show that fate has more control over our lives than we’d like to believe – they’re all here.
Johnny Mansell (George Baker) is living the life of his dreams in London, but when he dreams too high, he has to leave in a hurry, with gamblers and a small fortune in debts close at his heels. Forced to move in with his brother Dave (Terence Morgan) in a small strictly utilitarian apartment, he discovers that the platinum blonde nightclub singer Calico is the lady whom Dave has been spending all his money on.
Calico, of course, is played to perfection by Diana Dors, she of the fabulous hourglass figure that overflows so abundantly on top, and more of a fatale femme you cannot imagine. Dave has been so smitten by her that he has been stealing from the mill where he works as an accountant, and the auditors are coming.
Having no other alternatives, robbery is his only way out, he decides, and Johnny returns from a surreptitious but successful jaunt back to London too late to stop him. Even worse too late to keep from being involved himself when Dave’s plans go terribly wrong.
As for Calico, as I said earlier, she is but the initiating factor. She didn’t ask Dave to give her things, but he is determined to give them to her.
She in turn is in love with Johnny, or so she says, but he is determined not to believe her. Diana Dors, besides being a beauty, a stunning one even in black and white, is also good enough as an actress that we (the viewer) do not know whether to believe her either.
Not that it matters greatly, as events are not under her control either. These three unfortunates both do and do not deserve their fates, and it’s with a certain amount of inevitability that their destinies turn out so badly.
So – all of the right ingredients, but something’s missing, and it’s been difficult to say what it is. I think it may be, however, that the story releases its edge and its tension a little too soon.
Once the two brothers are forced to start answering questions, you know that the movie’s over. The timid bookkeeper Dave is simply not going to hold up. He’s weak, both he and Johnny know it, and so do we the viewer, a few scenes too soon and well before the curtain falls.
But if the ending is only ordinary, what precedes is not bad at all, and in my book, seeing Diana Dors at the peak of her beauty is worth more than the price of admission, several times over.
March 5th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
There’s a tie between George Baker (Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford) and Terence Morgan aside from this film. George Baker appears in two James Bond films (ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE and FOR YOUR EYES ONLY — dubbing George Lazenby’s Bond in MAJESTY),and Morgan was one of several James Bonds in the spoof CASINO ROYALE.
The Brits did a number of taut little crime films in this era, and this sounds as if it is worth looking for.
Dors sadly lost her figure, her looks, and what talent she possessed and some of her later appearances in film are both sad and embarrassing to watch. But at this point she was a knockout.
March 6th, 2010 at 2:14 am
I’m not so sure that she lost her acting talent, but from what I’ve read, you couldn’t be more right about the roles she had toward the end of her career. Those were way below those she had when she was at her peak, way below — and even her best parts were never as good as Marilyn’s, to whom she was most often compared.
As for losing her looks and gaining weight, it is sadly true. There’s a photo of her on this blog as she appeared in THE AMAZING MR. BLUNDEN fourteen years after she made this one, in 1972.
Check it out at https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=232
One would not recognize her, but she played the part well.
March 6th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
To be absolutely fair, although her film roles were rubbish in the final years of her life, she was still getting good, high profile TV roles (THE SWEENEY/THE TWO RONNIES/SHOESTRING/DICK TURPIN/JUST WILLIAM) until right up to her death. She burned herself into the memories of millions of people who watched her as the literally Satanic Bessy Morne in the THRILLER episode NURSE WILL MAKE IT BETTER. It was a brilliantly scary performance, and she can still give me a bad case of the creeps 35 years on.
I have to say that she was supposed to look awful in THE AMAZING MR BLUNDEN (a role that the director gave her in order to prove to the public that she could act!). A fairer example of how she looked in later years can be seen in the utterly bizarre ADAM ANT pop video PRINCE CHARMING.
March 6th, 2010 at 4:43 pm
Bradstreet
It’s nice to know that it wasn’t totally downhill for Diana Dors at the end of her career.
Thanks for a perspective of someone who was there, or at least closer to it than we are here on this side of the Atlantic.
All we have to rely on is Wikipedia and IMDB, both handy to have and still often deficient.
— Stvee
March 7th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Wikipedia and IMDB are great. I use them all of the time. It’s just that they can’t tell you that Dors was considered something of a National Treasure at the time. Although Marilyn is often used as a comparison, she was perhaps more like a British Shelley Winters; a former sex goddess who had become a well loved Earth Mother.
There is a bizarre, but true, story connected with Dors. Shortly before her death from cancer, she told her son that she and her husband (Alan Lake) had salted away somewhere in the region of $2,000,000. It seemed that they had taken a number of lucrative jobs over the years where they had insisted on being paid in cash. This had been salted away in various bank accounts that they had opened under assumed names all over Europe. The Tax Man never saw a penny.
Dors gave her son a sheet of paper containing coded information, and told him that Lake held the key to the code. Unfortunately, Lake committed suicide shortly afterwards, and the secret remains. The money is presumably still out there…