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"Are you alright, boy?"

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"They broke the mold    when they made Robert." 

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Robert Shaw as PC Ernest Frost

A Cornish fisherman smuggles a criminal gang across the English Channel but discovers their plot to murder him.

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Directed by Anthony Squire

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Screenplay by Anthony Squire and Kem Bennett from the novel

"Queer Fish" by Kem Bennett

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Produced by Donald Taylor

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Dialect Coaching by Robert Shaw

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Also starring Donald Houston, Fay Compton, Anton Diffring and William Hartnell

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Released by British Lion Films

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Release Date: February 10th 1956

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Running Time: 71 minutes

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Location(s): Beaconsfield Studios and Fowey, Cornwall

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Press Play

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DIRECTOR
Anthony Squire
(1914 - 2000)

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Donald 
Houston
(1923 - 1991)

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Fay
Compton
(1894 - 1978)

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Anton
Diffring
(1916 - 1989)

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William
Hartnell
(1908 - 1975)

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Shaw has a very small role as a Cornish policeman in this tepid drama about smuggling.

Robert also worked as a dialect coach on this film as he grew up in Cornwall. He appears sporadically throughout the film and even shows his prowess at bell ringing.

Despite a solid cast and some pretty shots of Fowey, the film never really catches fire and a paper thin plot doesn't help.

At just 71 minutes, it's the shortest film in the Shaw canon, but to be honest, you're not really missing anything.

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Lobby Card Gallery

By Martin Edwards

While researching my British Library anthology Deep Waters, I consulted a number of classic crime enthusiasts in the hope of broadening the scope of my selections. Jamie Sturgeon came up with a copy of "The Queer Fish" by Kem Bennett, an author and story completely unfamiliar to me. I shared Jamie's liking for it, and the story duly appeared in my collection earlier this year.

Kem Bennett may be pretty much forgotten as a writer now, but in his day he wrote occasionally for film and TV as well as producing a handful of novels, not all of them criminous. And he was involved in writing the script for a film based on "The Queer Fish". This was Doublecross, which was released in 1956, a year after the story appeared in a magazine.

Thanks to Talking Pictures TV, I've recently watched the film version. It's a typical British B-movie of its era, short, quite likeable, and crammed with actors who became familiar to me as I grew up in the 60s and 70s. These include William Hartnell, later the first Doctor Who, and the versatile Allan Cuthbertson, who was a good comic actor as well as adept at playing posh chaps in straight roles.

Cuthbertson and Anton Diffring play a couple of spies who are on the run, along with Diffring's wife, after committing a murder. They flee to Cornwall  - and the Cornish locations in the film are a pleasing bonus. I'm not sure which little fishing village formed the backdrop - might it have been Mevagissey, a place I've yet to visit? - but it's certainly nice to look at. The baddies hire Donald Houston, a local poacher, to take them in a stolen boat to France and freedom. But as the title implies, the trip does not go smoothly... Not a bad time-passer, though perhaps unsurprisingly I prefer the story.

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