Forte Algeri

Imagine the tired excitement of those fleapit cinemas in back streets all over the UK watching this dross and having to have paid money for the experience. Did it ever open in cinemas in the centre of cities ? I wonder. Films like this were churned out, with bad acting, bad cinematography with appalling regularity and this one epitomises all of them. Yvonne de Carlo was never that good; here she is appalling and opposite her is Carlos Thompson, a handsome actor who had nothing to offer on screen except his looks. I am perhaps one of the few who saw him in the now lost ' The Flame and the Flesh ' with Lana Turner and there by the sheer force of gravity of Turner's performance he adequately responded. Here Yvonne de Carlo does not give him the same rope of rescue, and he flounders in limp gestures and clichés. Thanks to the ' Talking Pictures ' channel we the public are often allowed to return to these fleapit films and I guess for some there is a sentimental value in watching these primitive films. One star for their strange fascination. The depressed, the lonely and the young lovers would go to see them and tawdry films like these would replace their different realities with double bills of cynically made inadequacy.