The Shakedown (1960)

Director: John Lemont
Writers: Leigh Vance and John Lemont
Stars: Terence Morgan, Hazel Court, Donald Pleasence, Bill Owen and Robert Beatty

Index: Centennials.

The Shakedown hasn’t been remembered too fondly by critics, Leslie Halliwell describing it as “of no interest or entertainment value”, but it has both as a capable British B movie, even if its likely most viewers will be watching for its historical value or a particular cast member.

Right now, I’m watching for its lead actress, Hazel Court, on her centennial, but on another day I might have been watching for a couple of future comedy stars, a future author or, most likely, for Donald Pleasence, who easily gives the best acting performance.

The poster gives away the basic idea but it’s centered on a crook called Augie Cortona. He’s a pimp when we begin, pacing his cell because he’s about to finish his sentence and find some overdue revenge out on his replacement. It’s his story throughout, for better or worse, and Terence Morgan does a capable job, even if he flips between scheming and vicious, with just enough sleazy charm to make it work.

The first of those future comedy stars is his cellmate, David Spettigue, but he has time still to serve and won’t properly join the film until much later. That’s Bill Owen, who we’re likely to see as outrageously young if we know him only as Compo in Last of the Summer Wine. He was actually in his mid-forties here.

The other is Gollar, who’s taken all Augie’s ladies of the evening. He’s a very recognisable Harry H. Corbett, sans his usual sideburns, just two years before Steptoe and Son. Rather than seek him out, Augie roughhouses his way to one of his former girls, knowing full well that his nemesis will find him instead.

While it might seem initially like this will be about Augie shaking down Gollar to steal his prostitution racket back, it quickly shifts away from that idea, ostensibly because the law had changed while Augie was in prison, rendering it a business model with far too much risk for its reward. And that’s true but it removes any opportunity the film had to comment on why, just, “With the new laws, the street game’s not worth a candle any more.”

The timing means that they’re talking about 1957’s Wolfenden Report, best remembered to history for recommending that homosexuality be legalised in the UK. However, it also had a focus on sex for pay and the report prompted a police crackdown on street prostitution and the Street Offences Act in 1959.

Instead, Augie tells Gollar that he’ll take him down but secretly robs him of three weeks of income to set up what seems to be an honest business. This confuses the police in the form of Chief Inspector Bob Jarvis, a reliable Robert Beatty, who is convinced that Augie is crooked to the core and has him carefully watched.

And he’s right. As the title suggests, opening up a photographic studio with a model school attached is just a front for his new racket. This happens after hours when the official business is closed and involves amateur photographers and naked models. It earns money on its own, but the right amateur photographer sparks an even more lucrative blackmail opportunity.

It’s called Jessel’s Studio, because he sets it up around a poor but talented photographer, Jessel Brown, who Augie meets by chance in a pub. Surprising absolutely nobody, Pleasence is impeccably good, quietly spoken with subtle nuance in every hint of movement. He does as much in his first scene as anybody else does in the entire movie and yet he makes it seem like he doesn’t do anything at all.

Sadly, his role isn’t as substantial as it could and perhaps should be but it may well be that the producers didn’t want him to steal the film from everybody else. After all, he’s a means to an end, never a protagonist. He only raises his voice once and Augie outmanoeuvers him. He knows Jessel is a recovering alcoholic and puts that knowledge to good strategic use.

Hazel Court is a protagonist, though we may not realise it immediately when Mildred Eyde shows up at Jessel’s Studio for model classes a half hour into the film. She’s frequently at the studio after that, graduating from classes to be a regular model for Jessel. Augie tells her she’s the most beautiful and graceful woman he has ever seen. Yes, he’s already fallen for her.

At thirty-three, Court may have been a little older than most of the models but she carries herself with an easy elegance, not so much as to be out of place but enough to stand out. The others don’t have that, not even Jackie Collins, credited as Lynn Curtis; her character believes that Augie has sexy eyes, delivering the line as she’d have written it a decade later.

There’s good to be found here, not least in a well timed suicide interruption and a mystery surrounding not one but two spies placed into Jessel’s Studio; it’s not hard to guess who they are but harder to be sure who each report to. Sadly, the revelation of one has a side effect of spoiling the other. Morgan is decent but Court outclasses him and Pleasence occupies a level above. I should tackle his First Thirty.

Court was born in Birmingham but she was able to suppress its accent. She made her way to film quickly, having met director Anthony Asquith at sixteen and appeared in Champagne Charlie in 1944 as a consequence. Uncredited in that as a “tipsy Champagne drinker”, she took three credited roles in her next film, Dreaming, after starring double act Flanagan & Allen.

More roles followed in British films and she had an “introducing” credit in 1947’s Meet Me at Dawn, a William Eythe comedy adventure. A stint at the Rank Organisation’s charm school, the Company of Youth, followed, as did other roles, including Devil Girl from Mars and a first horror film, Ghost Ship in 1952. Horror treated her well, her posthumous autobiography aptly titled Horror Queen.

That began five years later, as Elizabeth, the fiancée of Peter Cushing’s Baron in Hammer’s pivotal The Curse of Frankenstein, but as popular as she became in horror, she never let it define her. 1957 also saw her in Dick and the Duchess, a CBS sitcom shot in the UK; as the daughter of an earl married to an insurance adjuster.

Hammer also cast her in 1959’s The Man Who Could Cheat Death; that and Doctor Blood’s Coffin in 1961 were British films, but then she moved to the U.S. where she starred in three of Roger Corman’s Poe movies: The Premature Burial, The Raven and The Masque of the Red Death. After that she drifted into television until 1975, her final feature role The Final Conflict in 1981.

After retiring, she painted and sculpted, the latter an art she studied in Italy. She died at her Lake Tahoe home in 2008.