soundly battered by the DA (Jay Jostin), who vows “That’s a fish I’m going to fry personally” as he personally brings in the cop-killer. Luciano’s legal nemesis was DA Thomas Dewey, evidently the inspiration for the show’s hero. More interesting than the drama is a public ser- vice advertisement which attempts to enlist kids in the Ground Observation Corps to watch the skies in the spirit of Cold War preparedness for an air strike against America.


VCI have also issued several sets of Hammer


Film Noir, drawing on the large catalogue of Hammer-Lippert collaborations. LADY IN THE FOG, billed under its US title SCOTLAND YARD INSPECTOR, could as easily have been included in one of those—though it’s another effort from director Sam Newfield, who does better with the support of the small, but proficient British stu- dio than he did at PRC. Based on a BBC Radio serial, it’s an okay mystery in which suave, trenchcoated reporter Philip O’Dell (Cesar Romero) is stranded in London by fog and teams up with Heather McMara (Bernadette O’Farrell,


Maid Marian opposite Richard Greene’s Robin Hood) to investigate the suspicious vehicular ho- micide of her roguish brother (an unbilled Richard Johnson). Unusually, the decent heroine’s late rela- tive turns out to have been a blackmailing bounder, but the plot is nothing special as Philip mixes it with a slinky nightclub owner (Lois Maxwell) and exchanges barbed banter with a skeptical London policeman, Inspector Rigby (DICK BARTON SPE- CIAL AGENT’s Campbell Singer) while delving into a pre-war murder and tracking a vital witness (Lloyd Lamble) to an insane asylum. The Orville H. Hamp- ton script runs to some self-aware banter (“You never know when clues are going to turn up? Haven’t you seen any private eye movies?”) and Rigby sizes up dilettante O’Dell with “Of all the myths perpetuated by the cinema, the most pa- tently inaccurate is the invincibility of the amateur detective.” The hero is stupid enough to erase vi- tal evidence while trying to play a wire recording to the heroine, and also takes a long time to tumble to a crucial connection because doesn’t know “the nickname for Margaret is Peggy.”


Cesar Romero and Geoffrey Keene co-star in the Hammer-Lippert co-production SCOTLAND YARD INSPECTOR.


47


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