Director Terry Bishop won an Oscar for his semi-documentary Daybreak in Udi in 1949. Oscars aren’t handed out for films like Model for Murder, a British B movie from 1959. But Bishop does a good job with what he’s been handed and puts a polish on a noirish, crime-thrillerish story with a subtext all about strange, strained and irregular relationships.
In the familiar American-in-England role is Keith Andes as a guy called David Martens, who is in the country looking for traces of his dead brother and striking up a relationship in a cemetery (as no one ever does) with a young woman. Sally Meadows (Hazel Court) is a bright young thing currently slogging away in a lowly job in the world of fashion.
Sally’s a down to earth girl who rather likes the straightforward Keith, who likes her, and she’s soon introduced him to her world of snooty models and camp fashion designers in Money London. When one of the fashion house’s top models is murdered, the two of them start trying to work out why she died. What they don’t know, but we do, is that there’s something shady going on at the fashion house, which the dead woman knew too much about.
The cops wheeze flatfootedly behind them, while all around them wheel the sort of characters you get in films like this. Designer Kingsley Beauchamp (Michael Gough) with a cat tucked under an arm. Model Diane Leight (Julia Arnall) too good for the hoi polloi. Rich-but-new-money Northern factory owner Freddie Ramsbottom (the name says it all), keen to court Diane, who’s taking him for a ride. Sinister chauffeur Costard (Edwin Richfield) and his working-class pal Podd (Alfred Burke).
Because Andes is playing someone called Martens, and he’s in the UK searching for a missing man in Europe, at first it looks like it’s going to be a slight re-run of The Third Man, in which a man called Martins (played by Joseph Cotten) was looking for Orson Welles’s Harry Lime in Vienna.
But that’s either a feint or an oversight. I suspect a feint because the characters in this film are deliberate and well drawn. Sally and the sister she lives with are bright young women enjoying the loosening of attitudes at the end of the 1950s – 1960s girls in utero. Beauchamp is a gay man whose sexuality is regularly hinted at without it becoming a part of the plot. Ramsbottom, meanwhile, is the butt of the sort of classist sneers typical of 20th-century British cinema (one of the reasons he went to the USA).
Only Andes’s David Martens is a bit wan, but that is a common complaint with these American-in-England Americans, as if they’re there to reflect back British attitudes to Brits rather than be proper characters in their own right.
It is a very good supporting cast, though – Gough, Richfield and Burke would work non-stop from here until they died decades later. Joining them in the “very good” category is Howard Marion-Crawford as one of those avuncular, moustachioed coppers British B movies seemed to love – he’ll get the job done, just not very quickly.
Brisk and crisp is the tone – from Bishop’s tight direction and neat editing by Helga Cranston (who worked with Laurence Olivier on his 1948 Hamlet and Otto Preminger on 1958’s Bonjour Tristesse) to Peter Hennessy’s efficient lighting and William Davies’s urgent score telegraphing “crime thriller” all the way through, this is a film that leans forwards rather than lounges about.
And through it all so many not-quite-there relationships, absolutely exemplified in a scene where chauffeur Costard’s neglected wife puts on the gold dress of the dead young woman, as a substitute for the love she can’t get from her husband. Against that, a finale set in the airport that wraps things up way, way too neatly. Put it down to the dynamics of the B movie. This is otherwise a good film.
Model for Murder – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
