Dick Barton at Bay (1950)

Sick Product of a Sick System

Crappy film

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

So the Dick Barton series came to a premature end .It has to be said that this film is an improvement on the previous two,however given that they were both unremittingly awful this is rather faint praise.The plot is as childishly daft as those of the previous two.the cast is also an improvement with no less than Tamara Deni featured.the print on the DVD is rather strange.at times it goes from great clarity to fuzzy graininess.maybe they were using a lot of stock shots from another source presumably they thought that the cinema-goers either would notice or care to much.thankfully having finished the three titles i can now go on to something rather more interesting.

From the opening seconds you can tell this is in a different class to Special Agent, the first film of the three Dick Barton's. Background music and continuity are more professional and both gel to produce a tension sadly lacking before and the plot is also more cohesive, less slapstick and truer to the spirit of the thing. However the acting qualities are the same as before, Stannard playing Barton as a manly stoic clean-living clean thinking clean talking gentleman British God. See Red Dwarf for similarities to Arnold Rimmer, and his especially his parallel universe version who occasionally cropped up.This time Dick and Snowy are embroiled in trying to foil an Iron Curtain attempt to steal fantastic British disintegrator ray machine invention. Was anyone in the cinema really worried at the outcome? Patrick MacNee was hard to recognise as the callow youth at the beginning, but even then he was being cast as an all-round Good Egg. It wasn't released until October 1950, over a year after Stannard's death in a car crash in July 1949.A nice little unassuming potboiler, showing Hammer developing into a smoother operation.

The film opens with a government agent being chased through the dark Limehouse streets (he's played by a young Patrick Macnee of the Avengers). He is killed and papers taken off his body. However before he could be killed he placed a call to Dick Barton, another agent. Barton gets on the phone just as the fatal shots ring out. This causes Barton to leap into action since he knew that his friend was assigned to protect a scientist working on a new "death ray". Unfortunately for Barton evil enemy agents have already broken into the scientists home and stolen the scientist and his invention. The rest of the film is a mad dash to find out who took the scientist and where they are hiding him.This is a vast improvement of the first Dick Barton film, Dick Barton Special Agent. Actually its a pretty good, if workman like, thriller. Gone are all of the things that made the first film one of the all time stinkers,namely the slapstick humor, romance and meddling kids. They are replaced by straight forward action and mystery. This is, at last, the movie version of the classic radio serial. It makes clear how Barton ended up the hero of millions of people all over the UK, he's a perfect man of brains and brawn. Its is the sort of movie that one has come to mind when one thinks of 1940's mysteries. You have a stand up hero, a vile villain who masks his black heart by playing the piano perfectly, some great set pieces (the lighthouse sequence) and just enough seriousness to keep things from becoming silly.To be honest its not perfect, the film can be a tad static and stiff when things aren't in motion, however its never long before some is getting shot at or chased, so the flaws are really minor annoyances and quibbles.This is a good 65 minutes in another place and time. Worth a shot if you're a fan of the mysteries of not so long ago.