Leofwine_draca
PIT OF DARKNESS is another decent British B-film written and directed by Lance Comfort. He seems to have a good run of them in the early 1960s, making every penny of his low budgets count, and as a result this densely-plotted story is one of the better Butcher's Film Service outings in existence.The film features everyman lead William Franklyn as a kind of proto Bourne, waking up with no memory after suffering a violent assault. The last three weeks of his life are a blur, but it soon transpires that he's been involved with some dodgy characters who haven't quite finished with him. Comfort keeps you guessing as to the outcome of the story, and all is eventually revealed via a lengthy flashback.This is one of those films where everything just gels together quite nicely. It's certainly not the best of its kind but it's also hard to fault. Franklyn is a dependable lead but the supporting cast is even better. Nigel Green is the authoritative and a youthful Anthony Booth a spiv type. Nanette Newman makes an impact as a woman caught up in the plot. Leonard Sachs is a slimy villain and the delightful Michael Balfour a henchman who shows up towards the end. The climactic scenes in particular are quite exciting and overall PIT OF DARKNESS is sure to be enjoyed by fans of this genre.
kidboots
Lance Comfort directed some pretty distinctive films in the 1940s ("Hatter's Castle"(1941) etc) but after the commercial failure of "Portrait of Clare" (1950) he was soon relegated to Bs. He found himself in demand, even doing a TV series "Douglas Fairbanks Presents", because he managed to make even his most insignificant films stand out usually by making his main characters a little naïve or gullible. This was certainly the case with this movie, adapted from the book "To Dusty Death" by Hugh McCutcheon and with a plot line lifted from the vastly superior and believable "Home By Seven" (1952). In this one Richard Logan (William Franklyn) stumbles into his flat after being found groggy and dazed in a local wasteground by a young boy. He thinks he is late by a few hours but distraught wifey Julie (Moira Redmond) informs him that he has been missing for three weeks!! She is understandably frantic and has already linked him to his comely secretary. It may be Franklyn's demeanour but wow, he sure looks shifty, especially when he is busy denying knowledge of good time girl Mavis (pretty Jacqueline Jones looks very fetching) who is forever ringing Julie and demanding to speak to Richard. Another worry is a private investigator hired by Julie and whose card turns up in Richard's pocket - he has been found dead and Richard can't be certain whether he killed him in those three lost weeks!!Then there is "the song" - "My Heart is the Lover", one of those dreary songs that often turned up in these type of movies and sung by nondescript singer Ronny Hall. Only problem is - it is used as a plot device so harassed Richard begins hearing it everywhere he goes - Julie even plays it when they're having breakfast!! And did I mention he also has the strange feeling he is being followed. Every time he comes home he looks as though he has been roughed up and I'm sorry, Julie isn't buying the old "I fell over" routine. He soon realises he had been kidnapped by a gang who want him to break into one of his own safes to steal a priceless diamond and he was coshed when he tried to escape - fortunately for the crooks he lost all recollection of his entrapment. By the time his memory returns (through hailing a cab) he has already pieced together the facts that it is an inside job!!Beautiful Nanette Newman is almost the one bright spot - her Mary is coolly 1960's chic, she is his efficient secretary but surely she couldn't be involved!! She is engaged to resident teddy boy, the charmless Ted (Anthony Booth, soon to be cast in classic British comedy "Till Death Us Do Part" and also the father of former P.M. Tony Blair's wife Cherie) - he has a chip on his shoulder and for some odd reason seems to despise Logan. This is a solid little thriller distributed by the lowly Butcher Company which was the oldest film company in Britain, starting out in 1909 with training documentaries.
Alice Liddel
The title sounds like a Hammer cast-off, but the film is in actual fact a low-budget thriller about a safe-designer who wakes up dazed in Wapping, found by a young urchin, having been roughed up by some hoods. He goes home to his worried wife and finds he's lost three weeks of memory. The evidence suggests he's been having an affair with a woman named Mavis (only in England!), and killed the private investigator his wife sent to find him, although he claims not to know either. Soon he is being followed by some mysterious men in a grey Mercedes, and lured to a country house with a bomb in it. His efforts to retrieve his memory, and the possibly criminal events he has taken part in, are complicated by the possibility that he's going mad.The story of a man who wakes up in a strange place unable to account for a period of time is familiar enough - from Hitchcock's 'Spellbound' to the recent 'Memento'; it has even been treated comically in Launder and Gilliat's 'A Constant Husband'. It was also a feature of some of the more daring British TV programmes of the 60s, including 'The Avengers' and 'The Prisoner'. In some ways, 'Pit of Darkness' feels like an early TV programme, with its short length, its low-budget, one-take genre aesthetic, and the groovy John Barry/Laurie Anderson music that punctuates occasionally.Lance Comfort was a prolific producer of these kinds of film throughout his career, and is today, despite a recent monograph, a neglected, even despised figure. His work is accused of a lack of imagination, poor execution, shoddy construction. His films are shown quite frequently late at night on British TV, but invariably any TV guide will give them the lowest rating, dismiss them as beneath contempt or 'sleazy', an example of an underside of British film production that would give birth to soft porn in the 1970s and video nasties in the 80s.I am not for one minute suggesting that 'Pit' is any masterpiece, but I will claim that it is clearly superior to films like 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' and 'A Kind of Loving', or anything from the Free Cinema/New Wave/social-realism being touted in the Britain of the period. Its script (also by Comfort) is intelligent and often inspired. the amnesia plot gives an added dimension to any mystery, for two reasons: the hero must become a detective and may be the criminal; the clues and spaces he investigates are also a topography of his own mind, an indication of its fragility, raising the possibility that it might never be known. Logan's interruption of three weeks is profoundly disruptive, not only to his own identity, but also his marriage, and the retrieval of one is intimately linked to the other - he can only begin solving his personal mystery after he's convinced his wife.But does he solve his own mystery? The filming rarely matches the quality of the screenplay, but there are some excellent sequences, the best being Logan's return home from nearly being bombed (an eerie crime-in-the-country set-piece that would be exploited in 'The Avengers' and Hammer horror); the dreamlike tone carries over, the profound alienation of a man exploring his own home; he hears his wife talking, and the scene becomes fragmented, broken voices and sounds assailing him, a possible flashback, an insane vision, the realisation that his wife is involved, we don't know, but the dream/mystery filming (repetition of events, uncanny silences and emptiness) is closer to Resnais that British quota quickies.Throughout the inchoate repetition of a pop record he's never heard haunts him, and signals mental breakdown of some sort. When he begins to piece everything together, the process is preceded by one of these cues: it is significant that his solution is plausible only in terms of his own flawed conclusions, and could be coloured by his own fears and prejudices (his resentment at Ted for taking away a secretary it's implied he's been seeing etc.). The effect is bravely ambivalent.Further, the date on which Logan wakes is September 13. He's been missing three weeks, and twice he's told something he's aware of (the record, his wife's play) only came into existence ten days ago. That's September 3, the date World War Two started. He's found in a Blitzed bomb site, and his friend and partner compares his amnesia to one he received as an airman during the war. Is Comfort's modest psychological thriller really a film about Britain and its memory of the war? The fact that he's given us a film so rich in ambiguity suggests critics shouldn't be so quick to dismiss him.
