Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

FORBIDDEN CARGO (1954)

Decent enough British crime procedural wastes a clever prologue to go conventional on an undercover assignment to nab a gang of fashion conscious drug smugglers.  Too bad, that opening reel is a pip, as if Ealing Studios (home to Alec Guinness and eccentric little British comedies) made a film noir policier with an inspector from the Customs and Excise office rather than Scotland Yard.  Pleasantly wry Nigel Patrick’s the agent sent to look into a complaint about naval amphibious landing vehicles running over a protected beach designated as an endangered bird sanctuary.  Helped by local bird protector Joyce Grenfell, a buck-toothed Ealing regular, Patrick spots the interlopers (and their 80 proof contraband) thru Grenfell’s bird blind observation pit and . . . well, the rest of this putative film could just about write itself: local bird-watching territorialists against those sea-faring gin smugglers.  But after the battle is won, what to do with the alcoholic loot?  Drink, sell or dump?  Mild hilarity ensues.  Alas, my putative suggestion for the plot a road not taken; instead Inspector Patrick follows a lead from this small operation to a much larger one happening in Cannes where he comes across a yacht full of chic drug smugglers, falling for one of them too (Elizabeth Sellars).  Standard doings from then on, though a car chase finale is neatly handled by journeyman megger Harold French and there’s fine nighttime lensing from C.M. Pennington-Richards, known from the Alastair Sim CHRISTMAS CAROL/’51.  There's also an eccentric touch from bad guy Theodore Bikel, strumming out  a tune about the various fates of his criminal forebears.  More oddities like that might have perked things up.  But all we get is a tag ending for bird lady Grenfell, off screen since the prologue, reminding us of the film this might have been.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Ealing Studios did make a comic smuggling pic.  One of their best, THE LAVENDER HILL MOB/’51 with Guinness & Stanley Holloway.

No comments: