I am staggeringly behind with the "House of Hammer" podcast at the moment, so I'm only now watching this film that they did back in June of last year. "Break in the Circle" is not exactly a noir-y thriller like most Hammer films at the time, but it's a post-war spy adventure type film, which saw them actually travel outside the UK for filming.
Captain Skip Morgan (Forrest Tucker) is tasked with taking a trip to Hamburg and expatriating a Polish scientist, Pal Kudnic (Arnold Marle) back to the UK. Kudnic's friend, Baron Keller (Marius Goring) will pay him handsomely to do so. Upon learning that his would be girlfriend, Lisa (Eve Bartok) has been informing on his dealings to Scotland Yard, Morgan tricks her into joining him on the trip. They arrive at Hamburg and to the rendezvous point, but all is not as it seems.
With a lot of these Hammer films, I've tended to find that my most common reaction was boredom and drifting onto my phone. This one though kept my interest and that's keeping in mind that I was watching a print of the film that is on Youtube and neither the sound nor picture quality were what you would hope for. I was impressed by the budget spent on this one, as not only did they relocate to Hamburg for at least some of the shooting time, but also some scenes involved the use of a helicopter - and not stock footage of a helicopter as it would have been previously, but one hired for the production!
Though I watched it all and didn't get distracted, I would say that film could be improved upon. It's quite long, most Hammer films at the time were nearer the hour mark and this is twenty-five or so minutes longer than that. I appreciate that Eva Bartok is probably the most famous performer in the film, the only one I'd previously heard of anyway, but I don't know why her characters exists and is in the film as much as she is, other than so the film has a woman in it. It was never entirely clear to me why Scotland Yard were keeping tabs on Morgan in the first place, I can only assume there was some postwar smuggling going on.
Let's not go overboard, I wouldn't recommend the film to anyone not actively listening to the podcast, but compared to some of the others I've watched, this was reasonable.
Captain Skip Morgan (Forrest Tucker) is tasked with taking a trip to Hamburg and expatriating a Polish scientist, Pal Kudnic (Arnold Marle) back to the UK. Kudnic's friend, Baron Keller (Marius Goring) will pay him handsomely to do so. Upon learning that his would be girlfriend, Lisa (Eve Bartok) has been informing on his dealings to Scotland Yard, Morgan tricks her into joining him on the trip. They arrive at Hamburg and to the rendezvous point, but all is not as it seems.
With a lot of these Hammer films, I've tended to find that my most common reaction was boredom and drifting onto my phone. This one though kept my interest and that's keeping in mind that I was watching a print of the film that is on Youtube and neither the sound nor picture quality were what you would hope for. I was impressed by the budget spent on this one, as not only did they relocate to Hamburg for at least some of the shooting time, but also some scenes involved the use of a helicopter - and not stock footage of a helicopter as it would have been previously, but one hired for the production!
Though I watched it all and didn't get distracted, I would say that film could be improved upon. It's quite long, most Hammer films at the time were nearer the hour mark and this is twenty-five or so minutes longer than that. I appreciate that Eva Bartok is probably the most famous performer in the film, the only one I'd previously heard of anyway, but I don't know why her characters exists and is in the film as much as she is, other than so the film has a woman in it. It was never entirely clear to me why Scotland Yard were keeping tabs on Morgan in the first place, I can only assume there was some postwar smuggling going on.
Let's not go overboard, I wouldn't recommend the film to anyone not actively listening to the podcast, but compared to some of the others I've watched, this was reasonable.