Yeah, Being A P.I. Is Tough Work –Ralph Thomas’s Venetian Bird (The Assassin-1952)

 

 

Yeah, Being A P.I. Is Tough Work –Ralph Thomas’s Venetian Bird (The Assassin-1952)  

 

 

 

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Venetian Bird, starring Richard Todd, Eva Bartok, directed by Ralph Thomas, 1952

No question being a private detective, private eye, gumshoe, shamus, keyhole peeper or whatever you call guys, and sometimes gals, who do the dirty work of finding, or not finding, out what a client wants that the public police, the coppers, won’t handle, or can’t, have a tough time one the heat comes down. Once he (or she) gets too close for comfort and the fists and bullets (not necessarily in that order) begin to fly. Just ask a classic windmill-chaser like Sam Spade, oh sure, he put on a good front on as a bad P.I. but in the end he left the femme fatale who was driving him screwy to walk the plank, take the big step-off just because his P.I. partner was his partner and not cleaning up the mess was bad for business, was bad for all P.I.s. Take a guy like Philip Marlowe, another wind-mill chaser trying to keep an old man from thinking he was a complete failure with his wild and willowy daughters, trying find big goof Moose his Velma, trying to find his old friend Terry, trying to find some damn little sister who didn’t want to be found and a million other dirty messes that the coppers would just brush under the rug, if that. Or take Edward Mercer (played by Richard Todd), a British P.I. with a stiff upper lip working the international scene after World War II when every case seemed to spell murder.    

Here is what Brother Mercer was up against. His client, or the lawyers for his client, want to find a guy, an average Joe Italian Resistance fighter Renzo (whether he fought alongside the Communists who organized the resistance against Mussolini and the Nazis was left unclear) who helped downed Allied airmen including his client’s son and his people wanted to take care of him.  So off to Italy our man Mercer goes with a few leads heading him toward Venice. Of course this thing is a thriller so no way is he going to find Renzo easily.

See the dodge is that Renzo is dead, and everybody and everything is geared to keeping him dead for public consumption since old Renzo is a bad ass crook on the lam, or up to no good. So there is plenty of misdirection, plenty of fists flying, plenty of bullets flying before the whole thing gets settled. Oh yeah, sure there is a love interest Adriana (played by fetching Eva Bartok) who is supposed to be Renzo’s grieving wife and lure to Mercer.  Oh yeah, too there is a little question of an assassin. I won’t tell who, okay. I don’t know if the stiff upper lip British P.I.s measure up to the likes of Marlowe and Spade but in the cool be-bop jazz-filled 1950s Mercer fits in with the new post-war breed cool as a breeze detective.