Model for Murder sits at the polite end of Fifties British exploitation B-pictures, a stiff, washed-out world of bloodless Mayfair murder, and sexless fashion world intrigue. Strip Tease Murder, a still more salaciously titled, Soho-set near-contemporary of this 1959 curio is also released this month, getting its hands grubbier with some actual, heavily censor-snipped stripping. But in this imaginary Mayfair, the looming Sixties of kitchen-sink cinema, blazingly colourful pop music and clothes, Psycho and Peeping Tom are still unimaginable.
The pot-boiler plot finds merchant seaman David (Keith Andes, the sort of minor US star then thought obligatory) using his shore-leave to meet his dead brother’s ex-fiancée, now a flighty, top model. He’s more interested in beautiful, reserved back-room girl Sally (Hazel Court), but might be better-advised keeping an eye on her sexually ambiguous, impecunious boss Kingsley Beauchamp (Michael Gough). Soon, dodgy working-class types are visiting the fashion firm after dark, a stabbed model is floating in the river, a stash of diamonds is missing, and the hapless Yank is waking up in hospital under suspicion of murder.
Some British postwar pictures – Brighton Rock, Hell Drivers, Night and the City – used Hollywood thriller conventions to locate an authentically native, seedy energy. Model for Murder remains decorous even in the models’ changing room, but has its own stiff appeal. Its cast’s stories give it extra, secret life: Hammer Films and Roger Corman’s original scream queen Hazel Court, early Marilyn Monroe co-star Andes (whose son contributed to the psychedelic Sixties as Spirit’s bassist), troubled ex-Irish Guardsman Howard Marion-Crawford as a creakily avuncular Scotland Yard Inspector, and most of all Michael Gough. His slippery charm let him chart weirder B-movie waters later, ending as Batman’s butler Alfred for Tim Burton. His world here, though, is as lost as Atlantis.
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