Tuesday's Overlooked Films: Man Bait (Hammer Films)

This 1952 British film noir was released as The Last Page in the UK, but as the more lurid-titled Man Bait in the US. Despite the racy movie poster, it offers a nifty plot with a couple of twists. Hammer Films (better known for their gothic horror pictures up until the 1970s) produced this first movie and the others that followed in Britain, and Lippert Pictures distributed the films to the Yank audiences. George Brent, Marguerite Chapman and Diana Dors (her debut film) star in the picture. The middle-aged Brent plays a bookstore owner who is blackmailed by his gorgeous employee Dors after she kisses him in his office. He balks at paying up, and she turns up the heat with disastrous results. Her sleazy and greedy accomplice, played by Peter Reynolds, provides the muscle. I had to wonder how much longer such an independent bookstore as this one will be around while I watched the movie. The late crime novelist and critic Arthur Lyons (I liked reading his private eye novels) mentions Man Bait in his nonfiction "Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir!" from Da Capo Press. Man Bait isn't a bad way to spend the 84 minutes to watch it.