Breakaway (Cipa, Twickenham, Screencraft International, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards my husband Charles and I watched Breakaway, a 1956 British film that followed up on Murder on Approval a.k.a. Barbados Quest in casting Tom Conway as British private detective and all-around intriguateur Tom “Duke” Martin. Once again Martin gets involved in an international criminal operation, though in this case the MacGuffin is not a super-rare stamp (the so-called “Barbados Overprint”) but a secret formula for combating metal fatigue invented by a German named Professor Dohlmann (Frederick Schrecker). Dohlmann is living in a hotel in East Berlin with his sister Freda (Marianne Walla), and this being five years before the Berlin Wall was constructed, a British man named Johnny Matlock (Brian Worth), drives straight across Berlin from the American to the Russian sector, though he has to pass through a checkpoint on the way. Once he crosses into the Russian sector, Matlock visits Dohlmann and says he can offer him political asylum in Britain, but Dohlmann is dying (he says a marvelously poignant line, “I’m a good enough engineer to know when a machine is breaking down,” meaning his body) and his sister refuses to leave without him. Matlock gets the formula from Dohlmann and photographs each page of it, then burns the original, only just as the papers are smoldering in Matlock’s oversized ashtray his room is invaded by a group of thugs after the secret formula. (Oddly, he’s using an ordinary 35 mm camera to photograph the papers and he’s doing so in horizontal format instead of turning his camera around and framing the pages vertically – just the opposite of the way most people shoot scenes vertically on their smartphone cameras even if the pictures would look better horizontally framed.) Matlock then leaves Berlin and flies to London, where he meets his girlfriend Diane Grant (Paddy Webster – a girl named Paddy?) at Heathrow Airport, only along the way back to wherever they live they’re waylaid by a gang of thugs, who beat Matlock (though he survives) and kidnap Diane.

Along the way they drop Diane’s purse, but later Tom Martin (Tom Conway) and his ultra-annoying comic-relief assistant, Barney (Michael Balfour, alas repeating his obnoxious role from Barbados Quest) come on the scene and grab the purse. Then Tom traces Diane’s movements and asks a bartender at the “Crystal Jug Club,” where Diane was a “regular,” about her, ostensibly to get in touch with her to return the purse. It seems that two rival corporations are after the formula, one owned by Matlock’s father Michael (John Horsley) and one owned by MacAllister (Michael George). There are a lot of car chases through deserted London streets (at one point I joked, “They’ve just driven into noir London”) as well as equally dark country lanes, and Martin teams up with Diane’s sister, Paula Jackson (Honor Blackman, eight years before she electrified the world as Pussy Galore in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger), to find the film and get it to the British authorities. I was amused by the in-joke in the script (by Norman Hudis based on a story by Paddy Manning O’Brine) about the two sisters using different last names when Tom Conway also had a brother, the more famous actor George Sanders, but used a different last name because he didn’t want to coast to fame on his brother’s coattails. (George Sanders and Tom Conway made two films together, 1942’s The Falcon’s Brother and 1956’s Death of a Scoundrel, in both of which they played brothers.) Charles didn’t like the way the villains, Matlock and Diane, went crazy at the end – and I suspect the reason they made Diane a villain was they’d already done that with the ostensible heroine of Murder on Approval a.k.a. Barbados Quest – but ultimately it ended the way you hoped it would, with Tom recovering the formula (ya remember the formula?) and delivering it to the authorities. Oddly, Barbados Quest and Breakaway were made by different producing studios, different directors (Bernard Knowles on Barbados Quest, Henry Cass here) and writers (Kenneth R. Hayles on Barbados Quest, Hudis and O’Brine here), but Breakaway is at least a marginally better film, though Barney’s ultra-campy “comic relief” is even more tiresome here than in the earlier one. At least he gets one great scene, in which Barney runs away from the thugs that have invaded Martin’s home by fleeing out the window in his pajamas – and later, of course, he runs into the thugs anyway!