Checkpoint ** (1956, Anthony Steel, Stanley Baker, James Robertson Justice, Odile Versois, Maurice Denham, Michael Medwin) – Classic Movie Review 7319

Director Ralph Thomas’s 1956 British crime thriller Checkpoint is a middling, but quick-moving and feisty motor racing adventure, with lovely Italian backgrounds.

Stanley Baker provides a strong, genial presence as O’Donovan, an industrial spy sent by a British car racing company to Italy to copy another company’s racing car designs, in a melodramatic plot that soon leads to mass murder. An alarm goes off when O’Donovan opens the safe containing the designs, prompting a gun battle in which he kills several Italian police.

James Robertson Justice plays evil boss Warren Ingram, who orders O’Donovan terminated to hide his involvement with the plot. O’Donovan tries to flee to Switzerland disguised as a race car driver during Mille Miglia road rally.

As always with car racing movies, the action on the track is far, far better than the talky drama off the course. But it is a good, intriguing set-up, Ernest Steward’s Eastmancolor Italian location cinematography is outstanding, while both director Thomas’s professional handling and the friendly Fifties British cast help to spark it up.

Also in the cast are Anthony Steel, Odile Versois, Maurice Denham, Michael Medwin as Ginger, Lee Patterson, Paul Muller, Anne Heywood, Anthony Oliver, Philip Gilbert, MacDonald Hobley, Robert Rietty, Andrea Malandrinos and Dino Galvani.

Michael Medwin, 95 on 18 July 2018, plays ‘Ginger’ in four films: The Intruder (1953), Checkpoint (1956), Carry on Nurse (1959) and Rattle of a Simple Man (1964).

It was released by Rank in a double bill in the US with The Black Tent (1956), also with Anthony Steel.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7319

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