The Ferguson Boy, a.k.a. Bad Blonde (Hammer Films, Lippert Films, Exclusive Films, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, April 11) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’ (mostly) weekly “Noir Alley,” hosted by Eddie Muller. It was made in England by Exclusive Films, which later changed its name to Hammer and specialized in horror movies (mostly reworkings of the Universal classics from the 1930’s which amped up the sex and gore quotients), and distributed in the U.S. by Lippert Pictures. It was called The Ferguson Boy in Britain but for the U.S. the title was changed to Bad Blonde to take advantage of the notoriety of its female star, Barbara Payton. Barbara Payton was a notoriously rambunctious young woman who was born in 1927 and by 1938, when her parents moved her from Minnesota to Texas, “Payton gained attention in the community for her appearance, even among middle-aged men,” according to her Wikipedia page. “Her mother encouraged this type of attention due to her pride in her daughter's looks.” At 16 Payton got married for the first time to a high-school boyfriend, but her parents insisted that the marriage be annulled. At 18 she married her second husband, Army Air Force pilot John Payton, and though he wanted her to be just a housewife, she was bored and sought out a career either in modeling or acting. She got jobs as a clothes model in advertising layouts, and that led her to a movie contract at Universal-International in 1949. Payton made her film debut in an independent production called Trapped, a movie about counterfeiting with Lloyd Bridges as a counterfeiter who tricks the Secret Service into letting him escape from prison. She subsequently tested for the part of Louis Calhern’s high-maintenance mistress in The Asphalt Jungle but lost it to a fellow model-turned-actress, Marilyn Monroe. In 1950 Payton signed a dual contract with Warner Bros. and William Cagney Productions, and Bill Cagney was so taken with her he gave her a featured role in the 1950 film Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, a vehicle for William’s superstar brother, James Cagney. Alas, her next two films, both Westerns – Dallas, with Gary Cooper; and Only the Valiant – were only middling successes. Just then Payton got involved in a scandal that made her toxic to Hollywood’s official guardians of morality: in 1951, while engaged to actor Franchot Tone, she was also dating “B” lead Tom Neal. Neal, a former boxer, confronted Tone about this; fisticuffs ensued, and Tone ended up in a hospital in a coma for 18 hours with a smashed cheekbone, a broken nose, and a concussion. Payton went ahead with the marriage to Tone but continued to see Neal on the side, and in 1952 Tone divorced her and she and Neal broke up a year later. By this time only “B” producers would deal with Payton, and after a not-bad role in the U.S. production Bride of the Gorilla she moved to Britain and signed a two-film contract with Exclusive. The two films were Four-Sided Triangle (1952), in which she played a woman who comes between two boyhood friends who jointly invent a cloning machine; and this one.

The Ferguson Boy a.k.a. Bad Blonde was directed by Reginald Le Borg, an Austrian native whose birth name was Harry Gröbel (“Le Borg” was just “Gröbel spelled backwards). He was the son of a Viennese banker and financier who in 1927 put him in charge of his firm’s U.S. operations. Unfortunately, the 1929 stock market crash wiped out the entire Gröbel fortune, and Le Borg decided to stay in the U.S. and pursue his first love, theatre. He’d already studied music in Vienna under Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920’s, and after working in Austria as a student of Max Reinhardt and directing operas in provincial theatres, Le Borg moved to the U.S. permanently and did second-unit direction for operatic scenes in Grace Moore’s vehicles One Night of Love (1934) and Love Me Forever (1935). Ultimately he signed with Universal for band shorts, and after a stint in the U.S. Army during World War II he went back to Universal and started directing features. Unfortunately, the features he got stuck with were strictly “B” productions like The Mummy’s Ghost and Jungle Woman, of the latter of which Le Borg said, “It was an atrocious script, and a silly idea anyway. But, again, I was under contract. If I had refused it, I would have been suspended without pay, and I wouldn't have gotten anything good anymore. You had to play ball with the front office.” I’d long assumed Le Borg was Gay based on Stuart Timmons’s biography The Trouble with Harry Hay, which named Le Borg as one of Hay’s boyfriends (which led me to joke, “As Gay Universal horror directors went, Le Borg was no James Whale”), but his imdb.com page lists him as having married a woman, Delores Keith Ferguson, in 1945 and having stayed with her until her death (though the page doesn’t mention when she died). The Ferguson Boy a.k.a. Bad Blonde begins at an arcade, at which Charlie Sullivan (John Slater) and Sharkey (Sidney James) are running a boxing concession. They charge audience members to see if they can last three rounds with one of their fighters, only newcomer Johnny Ferguson (the drop-dead gorgeous Tony Wright in his first feature for theatres) turns out to be a skilled and well-trained boxer already who more than holds his own with his arcade opponent. Sullivan and Sharkey think they have the makings of a champion, and to that end they trick old-line boxing promoter Giuseppe Vecchi (Frederick Valk in one of the most offensively awful character-acting performances in movie history) to come out of retirement and be Ferguson’s agent. Unfortunately, Vecchi’s American trophy wife Lorna (Barbara Payton) immediately gets the hots for Johnny. At one point Johnny demands that Lorna leave the gym when he’s training, and Lorna says, “Maybe he doesn't like women” – a surprisingly direct Gay reference for a 1953 film from an English-speaking country.

Alas, we’ve already learned that women are Johnny’s great contention when he cruised the barmaid at a club where he, Sullivan, and Sharkey went for beer. Though she’s married to Giuseppe, Lorna starts cruising Johnny and ultimately gets him to have sex with her. Lorna starts telling Johnny how unhappy she is being married to Giuseppe, and once she’s groomed him well enough she tells him the only way they can be happy is if they team up to kill Giuseppe. Ultimately Johnny does so by drowning Giuseppe in the lake and then faking it to look like an accident. All this happens right after Johnny has lost the big fight that was supposed to make him a championship contender because, after she stayed away for the first round, Lorna showed up for the second and her presence unhinged him completely. Alas for Johnny, Lorna couldn’t be less interested in him until she announces to all and sundry that she’s going to have a baby and Johnny is the dad. The writers – Guy Elmes and Richard Landau, adapting a novel by Max Catto – could have taken the They Knew What They Wanted route and had Giuseppe, who is still alive at this point, raise the child and accept it as his own. (The Wikipedia page on the film says that Lorna was merely faking a pregnancy, but I read it as real.) Instead they followed the route of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, only with the woman instead of the man as the ultimate victim. Having escaped responsibility for the murder she in fact was involved in, she tries to poison Johnny by sneaking toxic pills into his soup. He eats it and croaks (though the writers aren’t specific as to whether he knew the soup was spiked and ate it anyway to commit suicide), and just then Sullivan and Sharkey, out to destroy this despicable woman who ruined and ultimately killed their potential meal ticket, call the cops on her. After she frantically searches for the poison pills so she can throw the remaining ones away, Lorna collapses just as when we see where they were hidden – inside the high heel of her shoe – and just then the cops arrive to take her into custody. The Ferguson Boy a.k.a. Bad Blonde is a film noir thematically but not visually – there are only two sequences that have the chiaroscuro lighting of classic noir – and as a movie it’s O.K. but all too familiar and redolent of tropes we’ve seen before in other, better films.

One gets the impression the filmmakers were trading on Barbara Payton’s real-life notoriety and casting her as someone similar to her public image: as a wanton wastrel who delighted in playing the men in her life off each other and ruining their lives. She couldn’t act for shit (though I’ve noticed in previous moviemagg posts about her that I’ve hailed her as someone who could have been quite good if properly handled and given a chance to develop acting skills), and through most of this film she’s obviously letting her looks do her acting for her. That’s also true of Tony Wright, though it pains me to say it because he’s got a chest to die for (his nipples are especially deliciously prominent) and one wishes that he, too, had the acting skills to go with his physical beauty. As for the rest of the cast, Frederick Valk turns in one of the most annoying acting jobs in cinema history and John Slater and Sidney James (who went on to a long career in the British Carry On series of comedies in the 1960’s and 1970’s) aren’t much better. The Ferguson Boy a.k.a. Bad Blonde had the potential to be first-rate film noir, but it got muffed at almost every point in its execution. And as for Barbara Payton, what, one wonders, were Mary Beth Hughes, Audrey Totter, Ann Savage, or Jan Sterling, any of whom could have played this part far better, doing that week?