The Adventures of Sadie

Shot on Mallorca (as the credits spell it), the first British feature in Eastmancolor (the process isn't credited on the film, which instead bears the unusual credit "Colour Photography by Wilkie Cooper") as well as being one of the first films in which the leading lady wore a bikini (which she is supposed to have made herself) must have been a tonic to weary audiences suffering through early fifties Britain.

Parts of it resemble 'Age of Consent', also based on a novel by Norman Lindsay (both of which were banned in their native Australia); but Joan Collins is no Helen Mirren and in other ways it again finds itself in the shadow of other, better films. The squabbling that breaks out over Miss Collins rather resembles Sternberg's little-seen 'Saga of Anatahan'; while Kenneth More gives one his worst performances as a drunken Irishman and was much better as 'The Admirable Crichton' a few years later.

The supposedly sophisticated banter is constantly undermined by an awful score by Ronald Binge; although even that acquires resonance in retrospect, since five years later he reworked parts of it as 'The Watermill'.