Another one endured for the excellent "House of Hammer" podcast, this time the 1948 film (I say film, it's only about 40 minutes) "River Patrol", which is perhaps the most inexplicable movie that Hammer has produced so far.
Robbie Robinson (John Blythe) is part of River Patrol, a post-war Police department patrolling the coasts and rivers dealing with smugglers, gangsters and other water-based shenanigans. Charged with infiltrating a gang smuggling nylon tights into the UK, Robbie and Jean Nichols (Lorna Dean) pose as alcohol smugglers and supply booze to The Guv (Wally Patch) and his gambling club.
"River Patrol" is pretty awful, often hilariously so. Hammily acted, with yet more the of the terrible fight scenes that we saw in the Dick Barton series, but at least the Dick Barton's had a story to them... in one case, a pretty good one. Here, our heroes wander about until they find their way into a gang, not necessarily "the" gang, but one nevertheless. Robbie tries to sneak into a base of operations, gets knocked out, wakes up, scuffles with the head gangster, that's about it. There are plot points, such as they murder of another member of the patrol in the opening scene, that appear to be establishing story beats to pay of later, but either then were lost in the edit, or just filmed to pad out the run time to make it to "B" picture territory.
The sound recording (at least on the version on Youtube) is awful, several lines are lost but to scratchy microphones, but then also to a generic music score that plays under most of the film and drowns bits of it out.
I mean, having said all that, and laid out it's many flaws, it was obviously made cheap, very cheap so perhaps picking on it is mean spirited. It is also, as I said, at times unintentionally hilarious. I'll never watch it again but I might remember it for a while.
