Murder on Approval, a.k.a. Barbados Quest (The Barbour Corporation, Screenbound International Pictures, 1955)

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

Last night (Monday, March 17) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing movie on YouTube, a 1955 British crime thriller alternately called Barbados Quest and Murder on Approval. I’m guessing the producing studio, the Barbour Corporation, had second thoughts about calling it Barbados Quest because that would have led audiences to believe all or some of it took place in Barbados, and none of it does. I jokingly called it The Maltese Stamp when I introduced it to Charles, little realizing how right I was! The MacGuffin is a super-rare (only four copies known to exist, and three are locked up in private collections and never publicly exhibited) postage stamp called the “Barbados Overprint.” An American collector, J. D. Everleigh (Launce Maraschal), has paid a British stamp dealer, Robert Coburn (Campbell Cotts), 10,000 pounds for the Barbados Overprint that was the prize possession of the late Lord Hawksley, a major philatelist. (Yes, there are the inevitable puns on the word “philatelist.”) Only Everleigh didn’t deal with Coburn directly but instead with someone posing as the stamp dealer’s agent, Geoffrey Blake (Brian Worth), and once he gets back to America (New York City, to be precise) Everleigh becomes convinced the stamp is counterfeit and made up as part of a crooked scheme to swindle him. To solve the crime and recover either the real stamp, the money, or both, Everleigh turns to international private detective Tom Martin (Tom Conway in his first of two films in this character, which is basically Tom Lawrence a.k.a.The Falcon in a new disguise) who orders him to go to London and get to the bottom of the missing stamp business. Martin crosses paths with Hawksley’s widow (Grace Arnold), who disclaims any knowledge of her late husband’s stamp collection but is well aware of the value of the Barbados Overprint, and also her secretary, Jean Larson (Delphi Lawrence, the female lead). The Hawksley stamp collection is supposed to be auctioned off in six months’ time but certain items in it, including the Barbados Overprint, are being sold clandestinely. Blake swore Everleigh to secrecy for six months when he bought the Barbados Overprint (or the fake one substituted for it) so as not to interfere with the planned auction.

Martin and Larson investigate the crime together – the two drive a really cool-looking Jaguar sedan with doors that open the opposite ways from most cars, then or now – and they find a circus poster that gives them a clue. They become convinced that whoever engraved the poster also made the phony plates to print replicas of the Barbados Overprint (so the plot not only resembles Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon but Raymond Chandler’s The High Window, in which multiple copies of a super-rare American coin, the Brasher Doubloon, were created and circulated by fraudsters, and in both The High Window and Murder on Approval one of the criminals turns out to be a long-suffering young relative of the rightful owner). The engraver turns out to be Stefan Gordoni (Ronan O’Casey), only he’s murdered by one of his co-conspirators just before Martin can interview him. At first we’re led to believe that Robert Coburn was just an innocent victim and Geoffrey Blake had posed as his agent to defraud the American stamp collector, but later it turns out Coburn actually masterminded the plot and hired Gordoni to create the plates to print the fake Barbados Overprints. What’s more [spoiler alert!], Larson, who seemed to be just a nice young career girl and a suitable match for Martin, turns out to be part of the plot herself, which Martin doesn’t figure out until the final scene, a confrontation at the Hawksley estate in which she holds a gun on him. Ultimately Martin weasels his way out of the threatening situation, the bad guys get arrested and he is on his way back to New York with the real stamp – only at the airport he’s momentarily (or maybe not so momentarily) distracted by the sight of a hot young woman, and there he goes again.

A lot of the Falcon movies Tom Conway starred in at RKO in the mid-1940’s also ended that way – the Conway character swearing off women and then tearing off after one. Like his brother, George Sanders (Conway chose to use a different last name precisely to avoid riding the coattails of his more famous brother), Conway was starting to look rather seedy by the 1950’s. His best films were his three for Val Lewton’s horror unit at RKO: Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie (both 1942) and Mark Robson’s The Seventh Victim (1943). According to imdb.com, Murder on Approval a.k.a. Barbados Quest was supposed to be the start of a Falcon-style series, but only one other, Breakaway (1956), was made. More’s the pity, for despite its derivations, Murder on Approval a.k.a. Barbados Quest is a reasonably entertaining thriller even though the sheer number of characters in on the phony stamp plot somewhat beggars the imagination!