JohnHowardReid
On the same excellent VCI DVD for "The Black Glove" (also known as "Face the Music"), Lloyd Bridges stars in the 64-minutes USA cut- down (variously titled "Deadly Game" and "The Big Deadly Game") of Hammer's 70-minutes 1955 U.K. release, "Third Party Risk". On the U.S.A. poster, fourth-billed Simone Silva is presented as Bridges' co-star. This was her second-last film. (In her next and last release, another "B" entry, namely Terence Fisher/Francis Searle's "The Gelignite Gang" (U.K.)/"The Dynamiters" (U.S.A.) (1955), she plays a nightclub singer and is billed fourteenth). In the cut-down pic, re-titled "Deadly Game", Simone deserves her second billing, as Finlay Currie is hardly in the movie at all and Maureen Swanson has even less footage. Daniel Birt directs efficiently, photography is attractive and the pace fast; but it's a minor film with a foregone plot. If you can't spot the villain in the first five minutes and work out what he or she is up to, you haven't seen many movies.P.S. I don't know about you, but I find all these title name changes confusing. I have got all of them right, but it was an effort. So no more for the time being. All DVDs with multi title changes will stay in the cupboard!
mark.waltz
After Lloyd Bridges is mugged on his way back from dropping an old buddy off at a Spanish airport, you almost expect to hear him mutter, "Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop drinking!". Like Leslie Nielsen and Peter Graves, his serious co-stars from the 1980 comic masterpiece "Airplane!", he started off as a dramatic actor, one in his case that was often action packed. Here, he gets more than he bargained for when he meets this old acquaintance by chance in Spain and ends up in an espionage-filled adventure surrounding that old spy plot favorite-microfilm. Taking him from Spain to London and back to Spain again, this film is predictable, giving a Spanish version of Sydney Greenstreet into the mix, an exciting fire sequence, and a Mardi-Gras like festival where the villain attempts an originally unique escape. Refreshingly short, it highly resembles an early TV movie with its commercial-like break fadeouts and sometimes preposterous plot twists.
GUENOT PHILIPPE
A total waste of time this little film. A sort of espionage, intrigue drama, very talkative, boring, sleepy at the most. I don't know the director and I don't intend to get further in that field. We have already seen tons of this kind of rare crap, where the actors play only to pay their bills. I won't repeat the plot; have already forgotten it.Only Lloyd Bridges may save this tepid programmer, but for the rest of it, forget the whole thing.Unfortunately, some European and American productions mixed together in the late fifties and early sixties seldom gave us this kind of features. And we have to deal with it, or watch them while pressing the fast forward button or switch the TV set off.
