Cover Girl Killer (1959)

Absolutely Brilliant!

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

There are some surprisingly long well-informed reviews of this seemingly rather undistinguished 1959 British B. Those who might have seen it at that time are now all senior citizens. But for a few, perhaps a very few, such elderly gentlemen it evokes memories of their formative years like nothing else.If you had been a young person with an interest in photography you would have been aware of the publications safely tucked away on the top shelves of the newsagents shops - as appear in this film. Soho was then as now an exotic location well known for the fleshly pleasures including foreign foods. Indeed it was a basket of exotica quite unique in the entire UK. Oddly at the same time, it was the home of army surplus radio gear - all displayed on stalls outside the shops. It thus drew serious studious radio amateurs old and young to briefly share its busy notorious pavements with its more permanent and mostly female residents as well as passing rather furtive older gentlemen in raincoats and often bowler hats whose visit might only be slightly longer than that of the innocent old and young radio enthusiasts.By the standards on the 1950s, the above would be quite unsuitable for any kind of family publication or family conversation as it alludes to what was common knowledge but then a taboo topic in family contexts. Such were the dim and distant 1950s - made vivid again by this film whose makers clearly knew their market.Did I see it at the time? I'm not sure - it would have been at least an A possibly an X certificate. Yet Felicity Young seems oddly very familiar. Why was she so memorable? Not just because she was very good looking. I think because she was a classy ostensibly "nice" girl who did - remove her clothes, not all of course. In a world then firmly divided between nice girls who didn't and not nice girls who did, Felicity Young produced a thrilling confusion in a younger impressionable mind - apparently.It is a strange thing that less can be more. In such restricted times, very little could seem very much more.

This movie for me is very much a sweet and sour affair. One the one hand I think Steptoe and Son is the finest comedy ever but also I think if it would never have happened we could and should have seen Harry H Corbett as one of Britains finest actors. This gem of a movie takes all the naivety of days gone by with the age old story of a bad man who thinks the world is changing for the worse and depravity rules. Blitzed into just 60 odd minutes this was obviously made as a B movie but is a world above anything it was made to run alongside. If this was remade today it would have to be a gruesome 18 cert affair probably filmed in the seedy parts of London and involve drugs and prostitutes ( Harry Brown springs to mind)but the way they get the message across without so much as a grain of smut is incredible. Absolutely fantastic piece of movie making and seems as relative today as it was when made over 50 years ago.

Although done so much better in "Peeping Tom"(1960), "Cover Girl Killer" was an early attempt to delve into the sleazy adult entertainment world with sex magazines, strippers plying their trade and the unusual casting of Harry H. Corbett, an actor known more for his comedy roles. With his pebble glasses, odd isn't the word for his look but it showed that British films wanted to at least tackle some unsavoury contemporary themes and on the strength of this film, Corbett was given a few off-beat roles before he hit pay-dirt with "Steptoe and Son".The glasses were just part of his disguise as a nerdy photographer who lured buxom models to duplicate their cover poses from "Wow" magazine without being in the least suspicious. Meanwhile the flaky young magazine owner decides to boost his flagging sales (somehow no models want to be "Wow" cover girls now!!) by running a series on the "Cover Girl Killer". Lovely Christina Gregg played one of the victims - Miss Torquay. Gregg was beautiful in the Jean Simmons mode and really refined her acting technique from this early role as a shrill talking girl new to the modelling game. It's such a pity she didn't have a bigger career. Her part, small as it is, does further the narrative. All the other murders are done with a lethal injection of morphine but she starts to panic when the killer begins a tirade of "you are frightened to be alone with me but you parade your body before the world" etc, so she is strangled.Like all those "my brain is bigger than the whole of Scotland Yard" criminals, he visits the police - as a concerned landlord who is convinced he has let one of his flats to the notorious killer. With models prepared to be on a "Wow" cover completely dried up, the police organize for June, the magazine owner's girlfriend to be the cover girl bait but "the man" is one jump ahead and hires a lookalike to be a decoy - while the police think they have their man, "the man" is free to strike again!!Butcher's Films were started during the Boer War and was the oldest company still in film production after the Second World War. It's most popular film was "The Monkey's Paw" and while during the 1950s it had gone into television, by the early 1960s it had all but ceased production.

One of the slowest moving B movies in recent memory - though just 61 minutes, it can seem an eternity, with cheesy sets, flat lighting, nearly non-existent cinematography (maybe an interesting shot or two at the 'climax', but I grasp at straws), long boring spates of dialogue where conversations are unnecessarily repeated and not much footage of the promised Cover Girls of the title. Nothing new here. Poor acting abounds, especially 'our hero', the aptly named Spencer Teakle, as the incredibly wooden and unlikely owner of the pin-up magazine WOW - though by way of explanation we are advised his Uncle gave him reins of the magazine to encourage a change in his nephew's square, non-sexy image. It didn't work. The plot is standard, even sub-standard. Cover girls are killed one by one by - you got it - a nut job who wants to 'free man from the lustful images that pollute his sanity', played by an unconvincing Harry H Corbett replete in a disguise that includes a Beatles wig (before the Beatles) and pebble glasses that look like the kind of joke glasses where the eyeball springs are ready to pop out at you at any minute. Wide eyed and obvious, he stands out as your typical unfriendly neighborhood pervert. Few chills or scary moments as Corbett has only two short interactions with the Cover Girls, neither one menacing. The first, in which he convinces a cover girl to pose nude, is a deadly dull scene (as there is no nudity or murder on screen - or even the suggestion of suspense)- just a quick cutaway when the killer apparently strikes. His last attack is somewhat better, in which (in the one interesting twist) Corbett convinces a theatrical agent to send an actor to Mr. Spencer Teacle's 'Kasbah' club where the police are waiting to entrap Corbett with model June who they 'talked into' appearing on the latest issue of WOW to attract the killer to come and kill her, promising her protection - right, heard that line before? The police naturally fall for this scam, leaving Cover girl/model/dancer/stripper/love interest/all around good girl, who's agreed to be the bait, in the clutches of the real killer. In an anti-climatic and quick scene (after suffering through endless exposition throughout the rest of the movie) Corbett attacks the heroine of the film and as the police close in on him and he holds them at bay with a gun, the quick-witted (for the first time in the movie) Teacle unties the rope to a catwalk where the killer is holding June, Teacle yelling "Hang on, June", and, thinking on her feet, she does, while Corbett conveniently falls to his death and Teacle and his 'dancer' friend walk away arm in arm to apparent domestic bliss. This is really a mess.