Watch Blind Date For Free

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Mr.S.Baker as a resentful and bloody - minded Detective represents the old time coppers who moved through the ranks on merit. No University Entrant he,fast - tracked for promotion to the highest command. Welsh working - class,veteran of a hundred pub fights,"hard" stops and years of listening to weaselly criminals deny everything until a quick slap brings them to their senses,he is ill - equipped to take on Establishment figures determined to muddy the waters in a murder investigation.Nowadays we would expect no less but in 1959 it was still a bit of a revelation that our betters should conspire to protect their own at the expense of some prole who would never amount to anything,wasn't a Mason and didn't belong to the right clubs. Mr H.Kruger -who had a brief but glorious career in British pictures as a "Good German" despite his Nazi credentials - plays a Dutch artist who is the first and initially only suspect in the murder of his mistress(Miss M.Presle) but as Mr Baker digs around it becomes apparent that he is being denied access to any other line of enquiry. The Establishment,the exemplars of privilege,power and corruption are closing ranks to prevent him getting at the truth. He is cajoled,he is threatened,but he is grimly determined to get to the truth. Seen on the other side of the fence in Losey's later,"The Criminal",Mr Baker has anger and energy to spare and a clear idea of who's side he is on. "Blind Date" is heart on sleeve time for the director and his leading man. Sadly Mister Losey's efforts to reveal upper - class malfeasance were met with political indifference and nearly sixty years later the police are just as spavined by politicians as they were then. The only difference is you've got to have a degree,apparently.Which is nice.

THE STORY: Jan Van Rooyen (Hardy Kruger), a Dutch painter, stops to buy a bunch of violets on a London street as he hurries to keep a rendezvous with a woman. But Jacqueline Cousteau (Micheline Presle) is not waiting for him in the fashionable apartment to which he goes. Instead, shortly after his arrival he is confronted by Detective Inspector Morgan (Stanley Baker), who accuses him of murder. Jacqueline's body has been found in the vestibule of the house, and according to the police doctor she was killed after the time Van Rooyen, by his own admission, entered the apartment. Morgan, a tough, efficient policeman, listens sceptically to Van Rooyen's denials. Incredulously, the young man realizes that the circumstantial evidence against him is overwhelming. COMMENT: Although it certainly sounds intriguing, the plot isn't much. It's mildly intriguing, but the solution is obvious once the central idea — borrowed from Vera Caspary's Laura — is introduced. Losey has tried to work up some interest. Most of the first half of the film is played in dark shadows and all the players work hard to give their characters credibility, but all they have really done is to make the little asides (Police Sergeant explaining to the suspect what he thinks is wrong with the police recruitment advertising, and all the business with the old school tie) more interesting than the main plot and thus to show up its inadequacy to sustain a film of this length.

I wanted to like BLIND DATE but in the end I was a bit bored by the whole thing, which was a shame as the film has a decent script with strong characterisation and an excellent little cast which lifts this B-movie quite considerably. I enjoyed the way that the murder mystery story is used to explore British class issues but at the end of the day it's all rather staid and talky, which means that as a thriller it doesn't work so well.Hardy Kruger (THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX) is the erstwhile lead and plays a young and idealistic youth who turns up at a flat looking for fun. Unfortunately he finds it empty, dozes off and wakes to find out that he's being investigated for murder with a corpse in the next room. The excellent Stanley Baker is the detective doing the questioning, and he gets to use his own Welsh accent for a change. The first half of the film, in which the viewer is almost as befuddled as the Kruger character, is quite taut and inventive and makes good use of the back and forth questioning style.The second half loses the single location setting and also loses most of the suspense built up in the first section. The solution to the murder isn't really all that clever although it does allow supporting players like Robert Flemyng and John Van Eysson to shine. Gordon Jackson has an oddly small role as a copper which is strange as I saw him playing leads in other movies from the era. Jack MacGowran supplies humour and the one misstep is Micheline Presle, whose character is dullish and never really convinces as an object of lust. BLIND DATE isn't all bad and has plenty of potential, and most viewers will probably get more out of it than I did, but I just didn't connect with this film in its latter stages.

It can sometimes be interesting to study the early work of directors who were later to emerge as important figures in cinema. Some show little indication of what is to come (Carol Reed's "Bank Holiday " for instance) while with others the fingerprints are all there (Hitchcock's "The Lodger" and David Lynch's "Eraserhead"). Joseph Losey falls somewhere between these two extremes. An early work such as "Blind Date" has a competence and clearheaded sense of narrative flow that place it on a higher level than most B-style thrillers to emerge from British studios in the '50's but there is little of the original stamp that was to mark his later work such as "The Servant", "The Go-between" and "Accident". These films provide fascinating commentaries that an outsider from the USA brought to bear on the British class system. There is a little in "Blind Date" about the social hierarchy within the British police force, but this is peripheral to Losey's main task of presenting a neat little thriller well. He keeps the tension going nicely to begin with, with a young Dutch artist visiting a flat where he expects to find a woman he has been having a liaison with, only to find himself soon embroiled with the police. The script has a neat way of evading what is going on until some way into the film. Some of the flashbacks go on for rather too long and are somewhat weakened by a rather wooden performance by Micheline Presle as the woman of mystery. Hardy Kruger, on the other hand, as the young Dutchman is excellent. We really identify with his frustration at finding himself in a situation that is beyond his comprehension and control. As the main detective Stanley Baker plays cat and mouse with his customary skill. "Blind Date" is in so sense an important or significant film, but the fact that it was competently made by a director who was later to produce some outstanding works of British cinema makes it worth a look. There are two other good reasons for watching - photography by Christopher Challis and music by Richard Rodney Bennett - both considerable artists in their respective fields.