Kerwin Matthews was a bland American actor who achieved enough of a name in the 50s as Sinbad, to be signed by Hammer to make two films for them, this and Pirates of Blood River. He’s as bland here as he was in that, although both films he made have something to offer them.
In this one, Matthews plays an American artist travelling through France who gets involved with a mother and daughter. He flirts with both – they look around the same age – before finally banging mum (Nadia Grey). Mum says she can be with him, but needs a divorce from her husband, who is in a lunatic asylum for killing the daughter’s rapist with a blow torch a few years ago. The husband agrees provided Matthews and Grey bust him out of the asylum… and Matthews goes along with it! Even if it’s silly, at this point (the half hour mark) the film starts to pick up; until then it had been a lot of dull hanging around in the south of France.
The twists start to pile up – they bust out the hubby, hubby goes missing, there’s a dead body in the trunk!, mysterious sightings of a blow torch working at night, hubby appears, he’s in cahoots with the wife… but he’s not the real hubby but the nurse who we thought was dead! It’s only after a while you start to realise it doesn’t make sense – actually no that’s not true, I thought that at the time (namely – why does the wife go to all this trouble?), but I enjoyed it more than I thought I would after the slow first half hour. The setting at the end, the marble ruins or whatever it was, was great.
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