Lady of Vengeance
Princess Productions / Dist. United Artists (1957) Dir. Burt Balaban
73 min. / B&W / 1.66:1 / DTS 2.0 SDH
As a companion offering with another U.S. United Artists release (see Outpost in Malaya), MGM offers a very obscure British late-period noir with some interest for fans of the genre.
Dennis O’Keefe is the prerequisite American star this time; overly protective of his beautiful 21 year old ward (the relationship isn’t explained beyond that), and creepily so (his lack of interest in his ripe and willing young secretary makes his infatuation with his ward even more strange), which makes the young woman (Eileen Elton) rebel by taking up with a greasy, slimy musician who is only going to break her heart and we haven’t even gotten five minutes past the opening of the film yet. Time passes, the ward ends up throwing herself in front of a train, and O’Keefe vows revenge. He brings in a man called Karnak (Anton Diffring), who seems to be a harmless stamp collector but is actually a criminal mastermind who plots perfect crimes. Dangling a rare and valuable stamp in front of him, O’Keefe challenges him to create the perfect murder to right the wrong done the ward and we’re still not very far into the movie and if you are thinking there’s too much plot and not much else, you’re actually pretty close to the truth. The secretary is trying to talk her boss out of whatever he has planned, Karnak and his imbecilic assistant are after that stamp, and something strange is going on with the house O’Keefe lives in, which is all going to be part of a plot twist that’ll happen when the movie gets there, which takes about 55 min. but seems like about a day, not least of all because the director had zero flair and the British members of the cast speak in such clipped, overly mannered voices that it appears they were told that they’d lose 25 shillings for every line they flubbed.
Director Balaban, an American, only had one directorial credit prior to this, Stranger from Venus, another film shot as if the director was seeing each page of the script for the first time as the cameras were ready to roll on the scene. Which is not to say that the film is without merit; despite its, er, shall we say “leisurely pace,” Anton Diffring (well remembered for horror classics The Man who could Cheat Death and Circus of Horrors) acquits himself well. I couldn’t help but wonder, since so much of the film concerns itself with philately, if some sort of a stamp motif in the film’s art design or in reference to the final denouement of the mystery wouldn’t have been more satisfying. O’Keefe has to play stoic and sober and he does it with excellent posture, all that’s really required of him.
The good news is that the Blu-ray is terrific, the film has obviously been kept in great shape and the high-definition boost is a winner. Oddly, although the packaging and information announcement says the picture is 1.33:1, it’s actually and correctly presented in widescreen. No bonus materials.
