User Reviews

The outline of this story is good. Chris Pelly (Maxwell Reed) is blind but awaiting an operation to restore his sight. He seems a sensitive type who relies on touch, hearing and make believe - so far so good. He is invited to a farewell party but after being accidentally dropped at the wrong house he walks into a murder!!! The murderers are still there and once they realise he is blind, they knock him on the head and leave him where his friends can find him. He has managed to find a vital piece of evidence - a ring he has found near the body.

Now the film becomes just another crime thriller. Pelly has his operation and it is a success but along the way he loses his sensitivity, ogling all the pretty girls, trading cheeky quips with the cleaners and I then remembered what an amazingly wooden actor Maxwell Reed was. He returns to the house of the murder and meets Patricia Dale. Dinah Sheridan, by giving her role warmth and feeling, acts rings around Reed and it was a pity her career stopped soon after her greatest triumph - "Genevieve" (1953). Patricia feels the body is that of her brother Norman, who owned the ring. He had presumably died in an air crash, although Patricia never believed it. They track down all the "usual suspects", Norman's girlfriend, her bosses at the travel agency. They recognise Pelly, they were the mob at the house that night and are quite surprised to find he isn't blind anymore! There is also Norman's good mate Chalky - what is he hiding?

The ending isn't predictable but it would have been interesting to speculate what the movie would have been like if Reed had played a blind sleuth. A bit more care may have been needed with the story but Reed (who showed he could be a sensitive player) could have had a role he may have been proud of!!

Recommended.

Engineer Christopher Pelly (Maxwell Reed) is left blind as a result of a road accident. One night he sets off to a friend's party in London but his driver accidentally drops him off at the wrong house and he unwittingly interrupts a murder. The gang lead by Otto Ford (Eric Pohlmann) knock him out after interrogating him and dump him outside his friend's house. Following a successful operation to restore his sight, Pelly turns detective to unravel the mystery behind the murder. A lead soon presents itself in the form of Patricia Dale (Dinah Sheridan) whose brother, an RAF pilot, has been missing for over a year and presumed dead after his plane crashed. The pair join forces and the trail leads to a black market currency exchange racket. Pelly thinks that he is one step ahead of Otto and his thugs but they have a surprise in store for him and Patricia...

Content wise, Blackout is a totally run-of-the-mill affair and very typical of the endless stream of British b-pic crime thrillers that were coming out at the time. Reed is uncomfortably cast as the hero acting smooth complete with a put on American accent and coming out with a load of witless one liners. For instance, Dinah Sheridan says to him "Don't use up all of your nine lives" as he prepares to go out and tackle Eric Pohlmann and his cohorts at their country hideaway. "If you're lucky I'll save one for you" Reed replies. The love interest between Reed and Dinah Sheridan has also been worked out in the blandest way and it is not sufficient to stir the emotions. But the film is saved from total mediocrity by the excellent black and white Cinematography of Monty Berman, which is atmospherically sinister in its use of shadow and dark tones. It gives the proceedings a good sense of place and sinister atmosphere in this glimpse into London's underworld.

Some of the credits in the film are also of interest such as John Gilling who wrote the screenplay. He worked on countless quota-quickies such as this throughout the fifties often directing them as well. Several of them were made for Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker's "Tempean" company as this was. An excellent example of their collaboration at its best is The Voice Of Merill (1952), a thriller which was produced as a second-feature but was upgraded to "A" feature status on its release on its considerable merits. When the second feature market dried up in the early sixties, Baker and Berman turned to the small screen and were responsible for some of the best loved cult TV series of the sixties such as Randall & Hopkirk Deceased, Gideon's Way and The Champions. Meanwhile, Gilling would find a niche for himself in the British horror wave at Hammer where he directed two of that studio's most fondly remembered shockers, The Plague Of The Zombies and The Reptile. Trivia buffs will also know that Eric Pohlmann was the actor who voiced the unseen Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond movies From Russia With Love and Thunderball.

Overall, Blackout scores no points for originality in the plot department but it is kept afloat by the sinister and atmospheric camera-work of Monty Berman which gives it more weight than it deserves. It is dated but not to the point where it is unwatchable and can be enjoyed as a pleasant reminder of a corner of the British film industry which is now largely forgotten in the age of multiplexes and spectacular CGI special effects.

A 73 minute thrill ride filled with chases, beatings, knockdown fist-fights, smugglers, gun molls, a murder or two and all finished off with a blazing gun-battle. Maxwell Reed is a blind man who goes into London to see a friend. He is dropped off at the wrong address and enters what he thought was his friend's apt. He quite literally stumbles in on a murder that has been committed. The 3 murderer's decide one body is enough for a night. They have discovered that Reed is blind and simply cosh him on the head and dump him at the bottom of a flight of stairs. After Reed comes to in an ER he can find no who will believe his tale of murder. Several months go by and Reed has a successful operation to restore his sight. Now he sets out to prove his story is not a fantasy. He soon gets involved with a less than friendly group of smugglers, a pilot who is pretending to be dead and several interesting women. The great cast includes Eric Polhmann, Patric Doonan and the always thuggish Michael Brennan as the the smugglers while Dianh Sheridan and Annette Simmonds handle the females roles. Director Robert S. Baker was best known as a producer of "The Saint" TV series. A nicely done thriller with several noir twists thrown in. Good time-waster! (b/w)

A temporarily sightless Pelley (literally) stumbles across a murder victim, and is knocked cold for his pains. Once his sight is restored, spends his time solving the mystery.

This movie rattles along at a fair pace, and is well photographed. Acting performances are a bit variable, some distractingly so. The sound quality was a bit poor in places, and the print that had been digitised had suffered a fair amount of damage in a few places. Neither of these things were bad enough to spoil the film for me though.

It is easy enough to poke holes in a film of this type; made as a 'B' movie with limited time and budget, together with the World being a different place back then, a film like this might not make much sense to many viewers today.

Lovely Dinah Sheridan puts in a good performance but Maxwell Reed -playing a proto-Templar type role- seems somewhat wooden (his quips and one liners fall flat where Templar's wouldn't have quite) and his accent is just a bit weird. Reed hailed from Northern Ireland originally, so was perhaps unlikely to speak with an entirely conventional accent, but here there is a somewhat forced twang to it that is further west than Ireland even.

Almost any native English speaker is liable to find his accent a bit strange I think; what we most clearly hear are always the differences from the way we speak ourselves, so whilst any Brit is going to notice a mid-Atlantic element, the end result is inevitably going to be disowned by anyone who is from North America.

If anyone is confused by 'the generator': Back then, it wasn't unusual for larger houses out in the countryside to lack mains electricity; my father grew up in such a house; they had electric lighting, but only when the generator (in an outhouse) was running.

Scenes of London and the home counties circa 1950 have a charm all of their own, and things I took for granted when I was growing up (such as almost everyone smoking, nearly all the time) seem increasingly strange in these times of ours.

Also strikingly odd are the hairstyles; Reed's Brycreemed mound -along with his hat- appears to mysteriously survive the initial accident, plus various beatings up, fights, sundry cranial surgery etc, without anything more than the odd hair out of place. In one scene his hairdo competes with Simmonds' curly creation for 'biggest distraction', courtesy of the lighting which if anything was set to accentuate these absurd coiffures.

But if you can see past these things and take the film on its own terms I think it is well worth watching.

After a good start where the blind man Chris Pelley goes to the wrong house and finds a dead body the film becomes less interesting, though it may be odd to say, when Pelley regains his sight and begins to investigate the crime. Particularly as Pelley is played by Maxwell Reed who has a nice face but wasn't much of a actor. Better value thespian-wise is given by Eric Pohlmann as the villainous (he always played villainy well) Otto, Patric Doonan as the 'helpful' Chalky, and in brief but entertaining roles Madoline Thomas as the house keeper and Ida Patlanski as the postmistress. Sadly Michael Balfour has a brief apperance and the comely Dinah Sheridan has a routine role as the love interest. The twist at the end was forseeable. Not awful but could have been better.

"At first it seemed just like every other day", says a voice-over that, bizarrely, sounds uncannily like Nicholas Ridley, 1980s Tory oligarch and NIMBY hater. But hold! Maxwell Reed, Mr Joan Collins no less, is strolling along outside a country house, white sticked (he's blind, like), trilby hatted and three piece suited - and this is a film, of course, not some political nightmare, that's why it's on IMDb.

"As I walked towards the lodge gates, I remember the feeling I got – a sort of tingling in the spine." Oh dear. This is dreadful. It's also hard at first to connect Reid's voice-over, for it is he, with his real time voice on screen and its quasi American tough guy quips. Still, Benny the gatekeeper is here to smooth things over. "Who's doing the op for you, sir?" (Reed is about to have his sight restored). "Dr. Langley" (Reed says this very strangely.) "Oh, you'll be alright with him." "Yeh, sure I will", replies Reed. "Look, I only asked", Benny might have replied.

Before the op though Max wants to party. So via a drive through some classic English countryside – and Big Ben by night – he is dropped, although not literally, in Kensington. Or is he? Here we have the main problem with "Blackout". Despite it being a great idea for a film - blind man "witnesses" a murder but doesn't know who the murderers are or who has been murdered or even where he is - cast and crew are unable to exploit its central idea. There are some nice touches – typical baddie Eric Pohlmann trimming his moustache in a mirror; Reed reflected double in the windows of corner shop; and the climax features Reed confronting Pohlmann after shooting out the houselights. The villain of the piece experiences the "blackout" that was Reed's previous misfortune.

There's also the usual time capsule quality to film's of this era – Dinah Sheridan, popping out to meet Reed, dressed in a fur coat; and buses trundling passed, advertising Drink A Mann's Beer.

Once Reed's sight is restored, he talks straight American. Is this an analogy for old world England emerging in the post war light and throwing off its class based chains – or is Reed just a bit rubbish?

Reminds me of a story my old mum used to tell about a male youth in early 50s Birkenhead who affected an American accent – because he thought it was cool. His father sent him to a psychiatrist.

Some of the darker moments in this film reminded me of the 1944 Dick Powell film noir "Murder My Sweet" which in spite of its excellence and classic status had elements that came off as confusing in many ways until everything began to come together. Keeping an audience intrigued to twists and turns that are confusing at first is one thing, but boring them to pieces at other times is not a way to keep the audience intrigued. Maxwell Reed plays a character whose temporary blindness is ending, and what a time his sight chooses to return. He walks right into the location of a murder scene and spends the remainder of the film getting into all sorts of trouble and meeting all sorts of weird people who are incomprehensible to say the least.

This is one film that ends up being destroyed by its attempt to be more intelligent than the audience. You have to be in the right mood to watch a film like this, and I'm not about to put this aside to wait until I feel that I am in that right mood. People only watch movies once for the most part so you have to grab them immediately if they are going to either like it, recommended or keep it and watch it again and again. That is not the case for me with this film which I found pretentious and deceitful to the audience.

There are more twists and curves in 80 minutes in this film then there are on the roads in all of the mountains in California, and when someone says that the pieces are getting ready to fit, I was at the point where I didn't care anymore. It was a struggle to just stay awake and not going to my own blackout. That being said as while I disliked the film intensely, I did admire a camera work and technical aspects of the movie. But that's not enough. I have to comprehend what's going on in a film like this even if I don't instantly understand everything. That wasn't the case here at all. Reed certainly is very handsome, reminding me of a more rugged Dirk Bogarde, but his performance was just dull. Dinah Sheridan tries as well but nothing could straighten out the mess that the direction and script created.