Cover Girl Killer (1959)

Barely an hour long, this late night TV time-waster is a hasty b&w contemporary of such lushly perverse British pictures as Peeping Tom and Horrors of the Black Museum. Harry H. Corbett, years away from Steptoe & Son, is an anonymous maniac ('the borderline between what we call insanity and a hypersensitive intellect is often not very clear') first found peering at a hideous publicity photo of a stripper outside a Windmill-type London theatre. Maybe it's the extreme low budget, which means a reliance on pudgy and awkward actresses to play the victims, or maybe the occasional touch of disgust in the script ('undressing for tired businessmen, bit of a dead-end job?'), but the cramped and tatty theatre - they actually have a stage-door keeper called Pop and the big number is 'She's the Showgirl With the Most to Show' - somehow catches the mix of genteel anguish and pathetic sleaze that characterises British porn.

Disguising himself with a raincoat, thick specs and a greasy wig, the madman murders the brazen hussies who appear on the cover of Wow magazine. Posing as a TV producer or an ad exec to lure cringingly inadequate models ('come, come, Miss Adams, you're too modest. After all, you are Miss Torquay') to cramped locales where he recreates the cover shots, Corbett injects them with a morphine overdose (an odd murder method ditched for plain old strangulation and gunfire later in the film). The purple passages ('surely sex and horror are the new Gods in this polluted world of so-called entertainment') sound like self-loathing on the part of writer-director Bishop. A friendly caricature Jewish theatrical agent's defensive 'I'm all for a bit of the X-certificate myself' hardly balances Corbett's declaration of an intent 'to give man back his dignity, to free him from the prison of lustful images which foul his mind and his
sanity'.

Corbett is tracked down by Canadian archaeologist Spencer Teakle, who has inherited Wow from a disreputable uncle, terribly well-bred showgirl Felicity Young, who briefly gets into a frilly corset, and plodding copper Victor Brooks, who consistently muffs his dialogue and ploughs on. Presumably because there isn't enough plot for a 25-minute TV episode, the investigation keeps turning up almost-interesting one-scene characters: sad and drab men who whinge about lost women from retirement homes in Torquay or two-room dumps in Fulham. Only once does Cover Girl Killer touch greatness, when Corbett tries to sidestep a police trap by duping an agent into sending an unemployed actor disguised as the killer to the heroine's dressing room on the pretence of meeting a producer who wants to make a film about the case. The idea is that the poor sap (Denis Holmes) will be nabbed and clear the way for the real murder attempt and, as expected, the plods fall for it, only to have Teakle see through the deception and lead everyone back to the girlie theatre for a final confrontation which ends up with Corbett's fatal fall from the rigging.

The priceless moment comes slightly before the flat and thrill-less finale, as Holmes is dragged off to Scotland Yard, whining 'I've been an actor for twelve years, my face is well-known. I was with the Old Vic.' Just for a moment, pompousness and self-pity seem unforced. Here, the film shows a bitterness (probably unfeigned: have you ever heard of Denis Holmes?) that conveys not only the character's dead-end desperation (he admits he hasn't worked much recently) but also the real frustration of someone who knows he could play Uncle Vanya but is stuck with dressing up like Harry H. Corbett to play an unnamed character in two scenes towards the end of a film that must be about as low as the British cinema could get in 1960. Denis Holmes, wherever you are, you have not lived in vain.
KIM NEWMAN

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