Arthur and Ryck

One of the consequences of the current pandemic and its domination of all broadcast news is that I spend more time than usual watching Talking Pictures TV to get away from it all. I have been a fan of the station from its early days, partly for the pleasure of re-acquaintance with classic films which have been on the shelf for too long and also for the anorak-y buzz got from spotting old British actors in otherwise sub-B features. One of those dependable performers who appeared in many a TV serial or series in the 'fifties, including wielding a crossbow as William Tell, was Conrad Phillips. When his name popped up as the hero of 1962's Dead Man's Evidence, this second feature clearly deserved a look.

The film was a decent spy thriller with a couple of satisfying plot twists. Set in Ireland, it was well-acted by both English and (relatively unknown to a British audience) Irish members of the cast. They had to be good to cope with its major failing, the dialogue.

The story turned out to be by the author of a classic. Arthur La Bern (born "Labern", but changed to imply a Huguenot ancestry) wrote It Always Rains On Sunday at the end of the war and his novel was turned into one of the great noir features of the recovering British film industry, under the direction of the troubled genius Robert Hamer. It helped that Hamer had Angus MacPhail and Henry Cornelius as collaborators in the screen play. A later La Bern novel, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square, also became a film as Hitchcock's Frenzy. La Bern also wrote a few screenplays in the Edgar Wallace series, which Talking Pictures TV has been re-showing.

The most interesting revelation was that of associate producer and co-star Ryck Rydon. That looked like a stage name, and indeed it was. He was born Derrick Wilfred Haney in Canada and was well-equipped to play a suspected double-agent, as he had served as a private in the war-time elite joint American/Canadian commando unit known as the Black Devils. The report of his marriage to fellow-Canadian Kay Callard looks erroneous, however. Arthur and Ryck both seem to have been good at self-invention.