This was truly awful. Made in 1940, it is not just stuck in the 30s, it might as well have been made then. The acting is wooden, the script is negligible, the staging is as wooden as the acting and, again, the makeup is heavy - the police detective might as well have been a drag artist and Basil Radford (a grass between the smuggling gang and the police) turns up almost in blackface at the beginning! (We didn't last long enough to witness Radford's apparently famously witty final line.)
The story is of a smuggling gang headed up (rather unconvincingly) by a gentleman gangster/thief/whatever played by Jack Hawkins. Even he and a cameo part from Kathleen Harrison cannot save this film.
Typical of Edgar Wallace, there is a parachuted-in American, but why does it have to be the sister of the gang member Hawkins got rid of for threatening to go to the police, a character who is very clearly English? When Hawkins spins her a yarn that it was the police who killed her brother (and she believes him!) the final straw came when she a) decides to join the smuggling gang to avenge her brother's death without a second thought and b) has a car accident on her first job, only for the over made-up detective who has been tailing her to fall in love with her! Jeez...!
The story is of a smuggling gang headed up (rather unconvincingly) by a gentleman gangster/thief/whatever played by Jack Hawkins. Even he and a cameo part from Kathleen Harrison cannot save this film.
Typical of Edgar Wallace, there is a parachuted-in American, but why does it have to be the sister of the gang member Hawkins got rid of for threatening to go to the police, a character who is very clearly English? When Hawkins spins her a yarn that it was the police who killed her brother (and she believes him!) the final straw came when she a) decides to join the smuggling gang to avenge her brother's death without a second thought and b) has a car accident on her first job, only for the over made-up detective who has been tailing her to fall in love with her! Jeez...!