The Dick Barton Trilogy

In the late 1940s, well before they turned to gothic horror remakes, the tiny British Hammer Films hit on a surefire commercial move by making big-screen versions of then-popular BBC radio properties - PC 49, The Man in Black, Life With the Lyons, Dr Morelle. The biggest success of the bunch, and a definite precedent for the work Hammer later did with BBC-TV's first great franchise [Quatermass], was a run of three films drawn from the adventures of the wireless's premier action man. It says something that, even growing up in the 1970s, I had a sense of who Dick Barton was, though his popular show ran from 1946 to 1951. The urgent, breathless tone of the cliffhanger-prone serial [of which scandalously little survives] lived on in numberless parodies and its faster-than-fast theme tune ['The Devil's Gallop'] remained a shorthand signature for melodramatic, absurdist excitement.
Among the worthiest features of DD Video's box set of The Dick Barton Trilogy is a booklet of 'viewing notes' written and researched by Mike Lepine, which covers not just the films but the whole evolution of the character and his appearances in other media [comics, pulps, TV, the stage]. From this, for instance, we learn it is an oft-repeated untruth that Dick Barton - Special Agent was cancelled to make way in the BBC schedules for The Archers. The two programs overlapped by a year, though the roots of the still-running agricultural soap were in a remark that the countryside would benefit from 'a farming Dick Barton'. Actually, Barton left the airwaves for a more familiar reason: realising how popular the show and its hero were with children, BBC bosses insisted the ex-commando tone down his tendency to thump people and otherwise sanitise his adventures to stop busybodies writing letters of complaint, whereupon the neutered program haemorrhaged bored audiences until cancellation was inevitable.

Made between 1948 and 1950, the three Barton films tell roughly the same story, but the tone changes almost completely over the run. Though Noel Johnson was the voice of Dick on the Light Programme, Hammer hired Don Stannard to star - and cut the series short when he was killed in a car crash before he could make Dick Barton in Darkest Africa - as the two-fisted Special Agent. Like Ian Fleming's James Bond or The Avengers' John Steed, Barton is obviously a post-war take on the clubland heroes of Sapper, John Buchan or Dornford Yates. Unlike the gentleman amateurs who went before him, Barton has some sort of official position, reporting to an M-like superior [Campbell Singer] and turned loose when the nation is imperilled.

Dick Barton - Special Agent [1948], directed by Alfred J. Goulding, carries along a clutch of supporting characters from the radio show, saddling Barton with sidekicks Jock [Jack Shaw] and Snowey White [George Ford], a regular if sexless girlfriend Jean [Gillian Maude] and a comic housekeeper [Beatrice Kane]. All these people spend so much time falling over each other or getting into scrapes down at the pub [where the villains have plans involving poisoned darts] that barely a third of a film which runs little over an hour is left for the plot. An ex-Nazi [Geoffrey Wincott] is behind a smuggling gang who slip jewels and nylons into lobsters, prompting an endless dinner table routine as Barton's gang get served the wrong catch, but his long-term plot is to import a bacteriological war agent which will bring Britain to its knees. Barton finally goes into action on the waterfront, but it's obvious that he's hampered by the bagpipe jokes and the whinnying womenfolk.

The sequels pruned the clutter of characters, leaving Barton partnered only by cockney bitter-drinker Snowey; Ford returned in Dick Barton at Bay [1950], filmed second but released last, while Bruce Walker took over for Dick Barton Strikes Back [1949], which turned out so much better than the other films that its release was advanced. The follow-ups were directed by Godfrey Grayson, then a Hammer regular who could churn out films by the dozen, and tidied away the jokes into a few running bits for Snowey and concentrated on the thrills, though he was hampered by trite, repetitive plots. In both, Barton is brought into the case in hackneyed fashion by the death of a fellow agent who was first on the case [in Dick Barton at Bay, the part is played by a young Patrick McNee], a device that goes back at least to Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror. The mcguffins are science fictional super-weapons [a ray device that can make aeroplanes explode in flight, a suitcase-sized soundwave generator that can fatally dehydrate the brains of everyone within earshot] and the climaxes involve Dick scaling a high place from which the evil machine is being used [a lighthouse, Blackpool Tower] to biff the baddies, turn off the gadgets and save the day. There are even similar shots of dummies representing the mastermind-of-the-moment taking a tumble to his death.

Dick Barton at Bay feels like a rough draft: a femme fatale [Tamara Desni] with torn loyalties seems as if she'll be a major character but isn't [though Jean Lodge elaborates on this figure next time out], and the baddie, Serge Volkoff [Meinhart Maur], is one of those non-specific foreign menaces who could as easily be a leftover Nazi as a Cold War communist. The film is also in the worst physical shape of the three: all are prefaced with a warning about the age of the original elements and have some obvious damage, but Dick Barton at Bay looks as if it's been taped off a TV set retuned to a neighbouring ITV region. Luckily, the best of the set is the best-preserved. Dick Barton Strikes Back has more interesting menaces, with Sidney Greenstreet-esque Sebastian Cabot as a chubby, jolly, evil foreigner [Alfonso Delmonte Fourcada] who has the careless Dr Evil habit of leaving victims to 'certain death' from gas explosions or deadly reptiles. Fourcada represents more possibly communist elements, but he is accompanied by a troupe of rotten-to-a-man gypsy showfolk [even the children are in on the genocidal scheme!]. Behind him is a traitor in the British establishment [James Raglan] who whines that it's not possible to live like a gentleman any more as he schemes to kill off a town famously popular with working class holidaymakers. In test runs of the weapon, a couple of English villages are wiped out to a man. Though the film doesn't take advantage of this scenario to depict the sort of body-littered communities found in Village of the Damned or The Face of Fu Manchu, there is a first stirring of the sort of science fiction that will yield Seven Days to Noon, Quatermass and UNIT era Doctor Who as the army and boffins wander about the sites of these disasters in urgent puzzlement.

Where the film finally scores is in that it's the only series entry to take its hero straight. The other movies make play with Barton's celebrity - in each, he is helped out by a hero-worshipping lad who has read of his adventures in magazines - and even gently send up his status as a British icon whose status as a secret agent is compromised by his genial fame. Dick Barton Strikes Back ditches self-referentiality and lets Stannard play authentically tough. Ascending the Blackpool Tower as the sound weapon buzzes [and his theme music swells], Barton has a fight with a minion in a lift that predates a brutal scene in the film of Diamonds Are Forever and then goes into full-on masochist mode as he sticks to his task despite the awful pain inflicted by the high-pitched whining machine.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Crime Time

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