The Last Shot You Hear (1970)

My quest to catch up with obscure low budget films which used to turn up on the late night TV schedules when I was I kid continues with The Last Shot You Hear (1970).  This one was a regular part of ITV's post News at Ten schedule in the seventies.  I never saw it then, being too young to be allowed up that late, but the title always intrigued me.  By the time I was old enough to stay up that late watching TV, it had seemingly vanished from the schedules, never to return.  Information on the film also seemed scant, with many reference works seeming to think that it was in black and white, which seemed odd for a film from 1970, while others credited it as being a colour production.  None were very complimentary about it, noting that the film had actually been shot in 1967, but not released in the US until 1969 and the UK in 1970.  I finally managed to catch it the other day - the version I saw was in colour, as were all of its TV screenings, a black and white print had, however, been released to US cinemas (in 1969).  The Last Shot You Hear was based on a stage play - William Fairchild's 'The Sound of Murder' - and very much looks it, with lots of talky indoor scenes and a very static feel.  The play was first produced in 1958 and the film feels very much as if it belongs in that era rather than the sixties.  Despite the addition of some exterior scenes, the film's production feels very 'stagey', with the lighting in interior scenes seemingly always directly overhead and a lack of any fluid camera movements.  

The plot itself reinforces the feel of a time warped stage production, featuring one of those elaborate murder plots which rely on carefully timed phone calls and the like to establish alibis.  Inevitably, it all goes awry, with vanishing bodies and secret tape recordings of the main characters hatching their plot.  The whole thing goes through a number of entirely predictable plot twists before a final, equally unsurprising 'shock' denouement.  There is some attempt to update the play's scenario: whereas in the play the main antagonist is a children's author who won't release his wife from their loveless marriage for fear of a divorce damaging his image and sales, in the film he is the successful author of a series of books and newspaper columns on maintaining perfect relationships.  In both versions, the wife plots with her lover to kill him.  Unfortunately for them a third party, the author's secretary, overhears and records their plot, using the tape to blackmail them after the author has, seemingly, been murdered, with the secretary claiming to have subsequently hidden the body.  There's nothing here that the average audience wouldn't have seen countless times before, but usually better produced.

The film's limited budget is painfully apparent, with poor colour, which looks so weak that it might as well have been monochrome and minimal production values.  The film lacks any real stars, the closest it gets being American actor Hugh Marlowe, best remembered for playing the lead in fifties science fiction movies like Earth Vs the Flying Saucers as the author, in his last film appearance.  It has to be said that he does a pretty good job in making his character thoroughly dislikable, a selfish, egotistical domestic tyrant who treats his wife abominably.  The rest of the cast is made up of familiar British TV and B-movie faces, including Patricia Haines, Zena Walker, William Dysart and Thorley Walters, all of whom give decent performances in the face of an unyielding script.  Most startlingly, though, the film is directed by Gordon Hessler and it is hard to believe that this is the same man who would shortly direct Scream and Scream Again (1969), a visually far more interesting film, with lots of action, fluid camerawork, interesting angles and decor.  Indeed, Hessler was a director noted for his distinctive visual style, (most notably seen in the quartet of films he made for AIP between 1969 and 1971), incorporating lots of camera movement, so the static nature The Last Shot You Hear is quite jarring.  Sadly, he never seemed to quite fulfil his potential, eventually ending up directing TV movies in the US.

The film was the last to be produced by Robert Lippert's company for Twentieth Century Fox, an association which had produced some two hundred low-budget features, many, like this one, produced in the UK in association with British producer Jack Parsons.  The Last Shot You Hear is far from a lost classic, but watching it has at least scratched an itch that has been bothering me since I was a child.