that resembles the face-huggers of ALIENS, bringing on a weird, half-animated metamorphosis); and a classic “bad trip” scene, in which Ken and Jenny awaken in one of Moore’s morpho- chambers, and are repulsed by the sight of one another, mid- transformation. It’s hard to believe that this


movie ever ran significantly longer than it does here, unless the domestic importers simply lopped-off an uneventful first reel. For some reason, the main titles appear to have deliber­ ately omitted the screenwriter’s credit; according to Stuart Galbraith’s JAPANESE SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY AND HORROR FILMS, it was scripted by Kohichi Ohtsu and based on an original story by Masami Fukushima. The post-synched dialogue, spoken in English by everyone onscreen, is entertainingly campy (“Not the X-4! You’ll blow up the whole ocean!”), with most of the male roles dubbed by Brent Morrison (who succeeded Orson Welles on radio as the voice of THE SHADOW). Working from a 16mm source


print in terrific shape, with very few scratches and appealing color, Sinister has given the film a sharp and spiffy video transfer. Preceded by trailers for LIGHT­NING BOLT and ISLAND OF TERROR. —TL


• TO THE PUBLIC DANGER


• PENNY AND THE POWNALL CASE


1948, Video Search of Miami, HF, $27.90 ppd., 41m 42s/44m 41s


When Winston Wheeler


Dixon was writing THE CHARM OF EVIL, his 1991 book about Terence Fisher, he found it im­ possible to find Fisher’s second film outside the National Film Archive of the British Film


24


Institute. Happily, VSoM has now obtained a copy of TO THE PUBLIC DANGER (41m 42s), which they are selling in tandem with another Rank featurette, PENNY AND THE POWNALL CASE (44m 41s), featuring a third-billed Christopher Lee. (VSoM’s catalog update incor­ rectly describes PENNY as Lee’s


first film; if one counts HAM­LET, it was his ninth.) The tape is culled from an Australian PAL telecast; the original 24 fps run­ ning times work out, respec­ tively, to 43m 29s/46m 35s. Originally described by the


British press as a “Road Safety Drama,” TO THE PUBLIC DAN­GER seems in retrospect more firmly rooted among such “nightmare of acceleration” melodramas as Minnelli’s TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN, Fellini’s TOBY DAMMIT and Jan De Bont’s SPEED. The impres­ sively compact script, based on a play by Patrick Hamilton (GAS­ LIGHT, HANGOVER SQUARE), opens in a small country pub, where two locals—Nancy (Su­ san Shaw), a bored, thrill-seek­ ing blonde, and Fred (Barry Letts), her bland yet well-mean­ ing suitor—are spending a Sat­ urday night date. Their routine is shaken up by the arrival of two out-of-towners, the dashing, devil-may-care Captain Cole (Dermot Walsh) and his besot­ ted companion Reggie (Roy Plomley). The predatory, amoral Cole is attracted to Nancy, in­ trudes on the date, finds her responsive, and after many drinks, invites the doomed couple on a high-speed drive down dark country roads. Drunkenness leads to careless­ ness, and their car strikes an occupied bicycle, placing Nancy at the center of a volatile moral debate between Cole and Fred: Should they turn back?Should they report the accident?


If this Rank featurette was


intended as nothing more than a dramatized safety caution, Fisher and screenwriters T.J. Morrison and Arthur Reid take it much further, never flinching from some unsavory statements about the disillusioned public climate in postwar England. Each of the brilliantly sketched characters express a downbeat emotional side-effect of the war


just ended: Nancy wears a charm bracelet composed of mementos given her by soldier boys, and is clearly attracted to Cole’s military pedigree and the prospect of improving her sta­ tus by adding a Captain to her “collection” ; Cole, still coasting on his rank in civilian life, has lost his respect for humanity and seems bent on never com­ ing down from the adrenaline high he knew in wartime; Fred, a soft-bodied intellectual re­ fused for active service, suffers from poor self-esteem, describ­ ing his own loving feelings for Nancy as “a kind of poison in my system” ; and Reggie is the sort of tragic veteran who has learned to survive by avoiding sobriety at all costs. None of these unattractive traits is ex­ plicitly detailed, being instead consigned—as in Fisher’s ma­ ture works—to a fully dimen­ sional subtext. The surface is sheer titillation : attractive, arousing and dangerous, paced by editor Graeme Hamilton like a headlong run into hell. All of the performances are on-the- money, but Walsh (who was mar­ ried at the time to Hazel Court, the future co-star of Fisher’s THE CURSE OF FRANKEN­ STEIN) makes a particularly in­ delible impression, giving an incendiary performance that re­ calls (influenced?) David Oxley’s interpretation of Sir Hugo in the prologue of Fisher’s THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. A

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