Colonel March Investigates [DVD]

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Directed by Charles Reisner. Can reporter Mike Kent prevent more deaths while he tries to resolve a sinister plot to steal a fortune in jewels? Cast: Sheila Ryan, Richard Fraser and Leslie Brooks. The three cases flow fairly well together, it doesn't feel cobbled together at any point. If you can access the TV series, I'd recommend it, as a few of the cases are very interesting. Couch Gag: The opening title sequence shows Colonel March taking off his coat in his office and writing the title of each episode in a book. This then dissolves to an image of an object from within the following story. Often it's a murder weapon or an item of clothing. Sometimes its relevance is a mystery until it is revealed later in the episode. Other episodes, such as in "The Headless Hat", show the item that the episode is named after. Moustache de Plume: In "The Strange Event at Roman Falls", the wife of famous reclusive writer is accused of his murder after she reports him falling off the cliff near their home into the sea. However, it turns out the writer never existed at all. He was a male nom de plume created by the woman to allow her to publish her works and be taken seriously. However, after an old romance rekindled, she decided to fake the death of the fake husband to allow her to marry her love.

It Works Better with Bullets: When March exposes the mysterious 'Monsieur Z' in "The Headless Hat", Z tells March that he is very clever and then pulls a gun. March tells Z that the gun won't help him because it is empty. Z pulls the trigger only to discover that March is telling the truth. The first three made were stitched together for release to cinemas in 1953. This was not uncommon for a TV show at the time and the practice would continue into the next decade, particularly with The Saint. Colonel March Investigates, then, is a taut 70 minute anthology of three slight, though entertaining, mysteries with the twinkly-eyed Karloff. He gives the character an eye-patch, which he didn't have in the stories, but it adds something to the character, as we can imagine he may have lost it in the First World War. This, perhaps, is someone who has witnessed untold horrors and has come to terms with the world by engaging with its more whimsical wonders. The episode "The Talking Head" uses the complete version of the original theme tune during the end credits. It was usually truncated and faded up whilst some way through. The show's slightly mysterious and threatening theme tune was changed for the episodes "Error at Daybreak" and "The Silver Curtain" to a piece of jaunty, faster-paced music that had originally been used in previous episodes to accompany shots of a busy city. Fresh Clue: In "Death in the Dressing Room", March feels the palm of the Body of the Week before it is moved, much to Inspector Ames' confusion. Later March reveals that her hand was bone dry and not covered in oil as it would have been if she had been dancing, meaning that she had been killed before the floor show and that someone else had taken her place. The Colonel March TV series premiered first in the United States from Dec. 1954 to Spring of 1955, with a total of 26 episodes. It was only broadcast on television in England in 1955 on Associated Television (ITV London, weekends), broadcast on 26 consecutive Saturday evenings from September 24, 1955 until March 17, 1956. [5] [6]

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Sword Cane: March's iconic umbrella is also a sword cane. He undoubtedly bought it at the same place as John Steed. La Résistance: In "The Headless Hat", March befriends Mrs. Sargent: an English widow living in France. She tells him that her late husband was part-French, and they were both members of the French Resistance. She also reveals that 'Monsieur Z', the head of the underworld in Marseilles, is a former Resistance leader, and she may be one of the only people to know him by sight. THE WAY OUT (1955) AKA Dial 999 Montgomery Tully directed and wrote this British crime drama in which a man tells his wife he is being framed for murder. Cast: John Bentley, Sydney Tafler, Gene Nelson, Mona Freeman & Michael Goodliffe. As Himself: In "The Case of the Misguided Missal", Real Life Stage Magician Chan Canasta appears as himself: brought in by March to demonstrate how the missing book could have been stolen from the safe.

Shrouded in Myth: 'Monsieur Z', the head of the underworld in Marseilles in "The Headless Hat", to the extent that the majority of his underlings do not know what he looks like. Eiffel Tower Effect: "Death in Inner Space" opens with a shot of the Eiffel Tower, followed by the Arc de Triomphe and the Fontaines de la Concorde to establish beyond a doubt that the episode starts in Paris. Watch out for several well known faces, you'll see Ronald Leigh Hunt, Joan Sims, Richard Wattis, Sheila Burrell and more.Shut Up!" Gunshot: In "The Second The Mona Lisa", March breaks up a fight between the two bodyguards over the paintings by taking Lawson's gun off him and firing two shots into the ceiling. The region 2 DVD release of the 1970 Karloff film Cauldron of Blood (aka Blind Man's Bluff) includes the episode "The Silver Curtain" as an extra. Colonel March investigates three cases, the first a bank robbery, in which a mask wearing gunman gets away with a haul of cash, killing someone in the process.

Mistaken for Own Murderer: In "The Strange Event at Roman Falls", the wife of famous reclusive writer is accused of his murder after she reports him falling off the cliff near their home into the sea. However, it turns out the writer never existed at all. He was a Moustache de Plume created by the woman to allow her to publish her works and be taken seriously. However, after an old romance rekindled, she decided to fake the death of the fake husband to allow her to marry her love.Carr had used the character only once in his 1940 short story collection The Department of Queer Complaints, in which there is a subdivision of Scotland Yard that specialises in crimes of a curious or apparently impossible nature. The series was financed by the Americans and starred international film star Boris Karloff - most famous for playing the Chinese-American detective Mr Wong and, of course, Frankenstein's Monster. At this point in his long career, Karloff was a frequent guest on American radio series and even had his own show for children in which he read stories and told riddles. In 1952, he returned to England and made three episodes for ITV which acted as pilots for a longer series. Eventually, twenty six were produced, all of which were a brisk 25 minutes long. Boris Karloff in the persona of the eyed-patched, erudite March, offers three mysteries from his office in Scotland Yard, the Bureau of Queer Complaints.