Perfect Poison: In the "The Stolen Crime", a man who believes he has devised The Perfect Crime describes a new German insecticide that is colourless, odourless and tasteless, that vaporises when heated, and is fatal if inhaled. Later, his wife is poisoned using this exact poison. Karloff filmed bits of onscreen narration to help unite the three stories and these scenes are exclusive to the compilation film only. [ citation needed] Find sources: "Colonel March of Scotland Yard"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( December 2017) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) The second story was aired as 'Death in the Dressing Room', which is probably the weakest of the three. Set in a nightclub, it features an exotic dance routine which acts as a clue, while the always reliable Richard Wattis plays the manager. The running time to these is so short that there is virtually no time to set up a number of suspects, so the culprit tends to be the person who has been in it the most. No matter, as it's all about how March gets his man, which he does here in a tense confrontation. As usual, March's sparring partner is the Scottish Inspector Ames (Ewan Roberts), though you wonder why he's there as March seems to be a famous genius.

The Colonel March TV series premiered first in the United States from Dec. 1954 to Spring of 1955, with a total of 26 episodes. It was only broadcast on television in England in 1955 on Associated Television (ITV London, weekends), broadcast on 26 consecutive Saturday evenings from September 24, 1955 until March 17, 1956. [5] [6] Plot [ edit ]Some years ago, I worked my way through Thr Colonel March series, and for its time, I always felt it was somewhat ahead of its time, it really has that feeling of a 1950's American TV series, but of course it's set in The UK, with a largely British cast. The first three made were stitched together for release to cinemas in 1953. This was not uncommon for a TV show at the time and the practice would continue into the next decade, particularly with The Saint. Colonel March Investigates, then, is a taut 70 minute anthology of three slight, though entertaining, mysteries with the twinkly-eyed Karloff. He gives the character an eye-patch, which he didn't have in the stories, but it adds something to the character, as we can imagine he may have lost it in the First World War. This, perhaps, is someone who has witnessed untold horrors and has come to terms with the world by engaging with its more whimsical wonders. Gaslighting: In "Present Tense", Ernest, the husband of March's niece Emily, takes advantage of his supposed death in a plane crash to 'haunt' Emily and attempt to drive her to commit suicide. It Works Better with Bullets: When March exposes the mysterious 'Monsieur Z' in "The Headless Hat", Z tells March that he is very clever and then pulls a gun. March tells Z that the gun won't help him because it is empty. Z pulls the trigger only to discover that March is telling the truth. Directed by Charles Reisner. Can reporter Mike Kent prevent more deaths while he tries to resolve a sinister plot to steal a fortune in jewels? Cast: Sheila Ryan, Richard Fraser and Leslie Brooks.

This film version is an anthology of three episodes from the show, all of them featuring a typically imposing Karloff as the eyepatch-sporting hero. It's always great to see the genial Karloff playing the hero for a change, and his gruff charm adds immeasurably to the pleasure of this otherwise rather ordinary little anthology. My main disappointment with COLONEL MARCH INVESTIGATES is that the supernatural stuff is kept distinctly limited in favour of the more ordinary explanation. The Colonel March TV series premiered first in the United States from Dec. 1954 to Spring of 1955, with a total of 26 episodes. It was only broadcast on television in England in 1955 on Associated Television (ITV London, weekends), broadcast on 26 consecutive Saturday evenings from September 24, 1955 until March 17, 1956. [5] [6] Colonel March investigates three cases, the first a bank robbery, in which a mask wearing gunman gets away with a haul of cash, killing someone in the process. In Britain, the series was initially evaluated in the larger context of the programming of the newly launched ITV. Critic Bernard Levin opined: "If there were only something of signifiant badness, then one could at least take a hatchet to it. But who could take a hatchet to Wilson, Keppel, and Betty, stars of Saturday night's variety programme, or to the adventures of 'Colonel March of Scotland Yard', the intellectual content of which is the nearest thing to a hole I have ever seen?" [4] List of episodes [ edit ] Episode [ clarification needed]

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The three cases flow fairly well together, it doesn't feel cobbled together at any point. If you can access the TV series, I'd recommend it, as a few of the cases are very interesting. Smith of the Yard: Colonel March. When he is introduced, people often remark that they have read or heard of him. Stage Magician: In "The Case of the Misguided Missal", Real Life stage magician Chan Canasta appears As Himself: brought in by March to demonstrate how the missing book could have been stolen from the safe. Carr had used the character only once in his 1940 short story collection The Department of Queer Complaints, in which there is a subdivision of Scotland Yard that specialises in crimes of a curious or apparently impossible nature. The series was financed by the Americans and starred international film star Boris Karloff - most famous for playing the Chinese-American detective Mr Wong and, of course, Frankenstein's Monster. At this point in his long career, Karloff was a frequent guest on American radio series and even had his own show for children in which he read stories and told riddles. In 1952, he returned to England and made three episodes for ITV which acted as pilots for a longer series. Eventually, twenty six were produced, all of which were a brisk 25 minutes long.

A formerly ‘lost’ British short, directed by Peter Moffatt. Cast: Daphne Heard, Brian Murphy, Geoffrey Hinsliff, John J. Carney, Julie Lynton, Bookmark Clue: In "The Stolen Crime", the Victim of the Week is murdered when the killer douses her cigarettes in a Perfect Poison. The killer then enters her room and removes all her cigarettes and empties the ashtrays so there is no evidence of how the poison was administered. However, when March searches the room, he discovers that she had used a cigarette as a bookmark. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. A compendium of three adventures for Boris Karloff as the eye-patched Scotland Yard man in charge of D3 - Department for Queer Complaints (really). Stitched together (without ceremony) as a plug for the British television series, it clearly worked, since twenty-odd subsequent episodes appeared over the next four years, keeping Karloff in genial, efficient work. The region 2 DVD release of the 1970 Karloff film Cauldron of Blood (aka Blind Man's Bluff) includes the episode "The Silver Curtain" as an extra.

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Shrouded in Myth: 'Monsieur Z', the head of the underworld in Marseilles in "The Headless Hat", to the extent that the majority of his underlings do not know what he looks like.