Dick Barton at Bay

From the opening seconds you can tell this is in a different class to Special Agent, the first film of the three Dick Barton's. Background music and continuity are more professional and both gel to produce a tension sadly lacking before and the plot is also more cohesive, less slapstick and truer to the spirit of the thing. However the acting qualities are the same as before, Stannard playing Barton as a manly stoic clean-living clean thinking clean talking gentleman British God. See Red Dwarf for similarities to Arnold Rimmer, and his especially his parallel universe version who occasionally cropped up.

This time Dick and Snowy are embroiled in trying to foil an Iron Curtain attempt to steal fantastic British disintegrator ray machine invention. Was anyone in the cinema really worried at the outcome? Patrick MacNee was hard to recognise as the callow youth at the beginning, but even then he was being cast as an all-round Good Egg. It wasn't released until October 1950, over a year after Stannard's death in a car crash in July 1949.

A nice little unassuming potboiler, showing Hammer developing into a smoother operation.