Blind Date (1959)

Such a frustrating disappointment

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Mr.S.Baker as a resentful and bloody - minded Detective represents the old time coppers who moved through the ranks on merit. No University Entrant he,fast - tracked for promotion to the highest command. Welsh working - class,veteran of a hundred pub fights,"hard" stops and years of listening to weaselly criminals deny everything until a quick slap brings them to their senses,he is ill - equipped to take on Establishment figures determined to muddy the waters in a murder investigation.Nowadays we would expect no less but in 1959 it was still a bit of a revelation that our betters should conspire to protect their own at the expense of some prole who would never amount to anything,wasn't a Mason and didn't belong to the right clubs. Mr H.Kruger -who had a brief but glorious career in British pictures as a "Good German" despite his Nazi credentials - plays a Dutch artist who is the first and initially only suspect in the murder of his mistress(Miss M.Presle) but as Mr Baker digs around it becomes apparent that he is being denied access to any other line of enquiry. The Establishment,the exemplars of privilege,power and corruption are closing ranks to prevent him getting at the truth. He is cajoled,he is threatened,but he is grimly determined to get to the truth. Seen on the other side of the fence in Losey's later,"The Criminal",Mr Baker has anger and energy to spare and a clear idea of who's side he is on. "Blind Date" is heart on sleeve time for the director and his leading man. Sadly Mister Losey's efforts to reveal upper - class malfeasance were met with political indifference and nearly sixty years later the police are just as spavined by politicians as they were then. The only difference is you've got to have a degree,apparently.Which is nice.

I wanted to like BLIND DATE but in the end I was a bit bored by the whole thing, which was a shame as the film has a decent script with strong characterisation and an excellent little cast which lifts this B-movie quite considerably. I enjoyed the way that the murder mystery story is used to explore British class issues but at the end of the day it's all rather staid and talky, which means that as a thriller it doesn't work so well.Hardy Kruger (THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX) is the erstwhile lead and plays a young and idealistic youth who turns up at a flat looking for fun. Unfortunately he finds it empty, dozes off and wakes to find out that he's being investigated for murder with a corpse in the next room. The excellent Stanley Baker is the detective doing the questioning, and he gets to use his own Welsh accent for a change. The first half of the film, in which the viewer is almost as befuddled as the Kruger character, is quite taut and inventive and makes good use of the back and forth questioning style.The second half loses the single location setting and also loses most of the suspense built up in the first section. The solution to the murder isn't really all that clever although it does allow supporting players like Robert Flemyng and John Van Eysson to shine. Gordon Jackson has an oddly small role as a copper which is strange as I saw him playing leads in other movies from the era. Jack MacGowran supplies humour and the one misstep is Micheline Presle, whose character is dullish and never really convinces as an object of lust. BLIND DATE isn't all bad and has plenty of potential, and most viewers will probably get more out of it than I did, but I just didn't connect with this film in its latter stages.

Blind Date (AKA: Chance Meeting) is directed by Joseph Losey and adapted to screenplay by Ben Barzman and Millard Lampell from the Leigh Howard novel. It stars Hardy Krüger, Stanley Baker, Micheline Presle, John Van Eyssen, Gordon Jackson and Robert Flemyng. Music is by Richard Rodney Bennett and cinematography by Christopher Challis.Jan Van Rooyer (Krüger) arrives at the apartment of the lady he is having an affair with, only to find the police following him close behind. It appears that the lady, Jacqueline Cousteau (Presle), has been murdered and he is the prime suspect.Another cracker-jack slice of British film noir produced by the brilliant Joseph Losey. Blind Date finds Losey on the sort of firm ground he thrives on, examining hot topics such as class consciousness, eroticism, political pot-boiling, corruption, misogyny and at the crux of the story there's a very intricate mystery to be solved. When Losey was at his best there was an edginess to his films, and this is no exception, the construction of the tale is akin to someone dangling a piece of red meat over a Lion's cage (or in this case a Cougar), only to keep pulling it away at the last second.Hook - Line - Sinker.It all begins in a jovial manner, Van Rooyer is so happy, skipping his way to his lover's apartment, the jazzy musical score soars and shrieks, then the tone changes considerably, Losey and his crew have offered a false dawn. It soon becomes apparent that Rooyer is something of an arrogant snot, a struggling and tortured painter, he's hard to empathise with as he gets leaned on first by Gordon Jackson's efficient copper, then the mighty presence of Stanley Baker as Inspector Morgan - with Welsh accent joyously in full effect, he's nursing a cold and drinking milk, but boyo this is a guy you don't want grilling you...Cougarville.Rest of the picture is predominantly told in flashback, how Rooyer and Cousteau came to meet, their initial sparring and eventual relationship, with the mature femme fatale lady wrapping the hapless painter around her finger. Losey sexes things up, really gets as much heat as he can into the coupling without bothering the censors, he even slots in a sex metaphor that Hitchcock would have approved of. Then the rug pulls begin, the can is opened, worms everywhere, or is it just smoke and mirrors? Losey and Challis use every opportunity to use trusted film noir photographic techniques, but never in a lazy manner. Some of the isolated lighting used - particularly when Presle is holding court - is cheeky but potent with it, and the close ups, long takes and wide frames favoured by Losey ensure that no scene is merely being allowed to be ordinary. Baker, like Dirk Bogarde, was a classic Losey man, a meeting of minds that produced performances of steel and psychological intricacy. Yet it's not Baker who owns this film, it's Krüger, a multifaceted jumping-bean of a performance, simply terrific. As is the film itself, one of Losey's most under valued British treasures. 9/10

The DVD I bought via amazon.uk is "cheap" and has not any kind of subtitles. I read English well, but I don't understand spoken English very fluently. So, I didn't feel very comfortable with this item (or must I put the blame on the film itself?). Main assets: ChristopherChallis cinematography, Micheline Presle, intelligent use of the sets. Main weakness: absurd script (Kruger does not recognize the dead woman, his character is sometimes hippie sometimes "macho", the "establishment gentlemen" wear black suit and bowler hat, and Baker has sinusitis). Definitively, Losey did better than this one.