Never Mention Murder | |
Director: | John Nelson Burton |
Screenplay: | Robert Banks Stewart |
Producer: | Jack Greenwood |
Starring: | Maxine Audley Dudley Foster Michael Coles |
Cinematography: | James Wilson |
Editing: | Geoffrey Muller |
Studio: | Merton Park Studios |
Distributor: | Anglo-Amalgamated |
Runtime: | 55 minutes |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Language: | English |
Never Mention Murder is a 1964 British second feature film directed by John Nelson Burton and starring Maxine Audley, Dudley Foster and Michael Coles.[1] Part of the series of Edgar Wallace Mysteries films made at Merton Park Studios, it is based on a story by Wallace.
Liz Teasdale is having an affair with cabaret entertainer Tony Sorbo. Her husband, surgeon Philip Teasdale, has employed sleazy private investigator Felix Carstairs to tail them. As Sorbo and his wife Zita are performing their mindreading act at a hotel, Teasdale substitutes drugs for Sorbo's anti-smoking pills. Sorbo suffers a heart attack and is taken to hospital where Teasdale prepares to operate. The unexpected requirement to give a lecture to an audience of student nurses foils his plan to kill Sorbo on the operating table. Carstars tells Zeta what has been going on, and to cover his tracks Teasdale kills Carstairs. He prepares to perform a second operation on Sorbo, but this time Zeta, and the police, are watching.
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Such a very tall story, played for laughs, could have been wildly funny. Unfortunately, everybody concerned takes all the silliness absolutely seriously – to rather unexciting effect. Visually, an obviously tiny budget is used with only moderate imagination, but a doctor, for once, on the wrong side of the law does make a change."[2]