This pair of middling rereleases from Britain’s studio era are of significance because of who oversaw them: Wendy Toye, one of only two female directors working in the UK film industry in the 1950s. While her contemporary Muriel Box often chipped away at feminist issues in her films, these two features find Toye – also a child-prodigy dancer and prolific theatre and opera director – working firmly inside the commercial parameters of the period.
The Teckman Mystery (★★★☆☆), from 1954, is in the mould of the upper-class Hitchcockian runaround, starring John Justin as writer Philip Chance, who is commissioned to write a biography of a vanished airman called Martin Teckman. Toye whips up a brisk, intriguing pace in black and white as a series of sinister accidents occur at Chance’s flat connected to the experimental plane Teckman supposedly died in, and the author has a dalliance with the flyboy’s haughty sister (Margaret Leighton).
The thriller intensifies a touch in the final third, capitalising on location shooting around Tower Bridge and stacking up some noirish complications. The unflappable Justin, even after he’s been pistol-whipped unconscious, makes a good Cary Grant-esque debonair lummox. But in truth, in what was her feature debut (having previously directed a short and TV film The Golden Toy, adapted from one of her stage musicals), Toye’s direction is bland, and the film over polite. The cold war lurks in the background, but there is no hint of 70s paranoia or even lengthening noir shadows, just parlour game larks.
There’s a cheekier kick to 1962’s We Joined the Navy (★★★☆☆), Toye’s version – in colour this time – of a Carry On-style caper. “The road to promotion is littered with bright young men, all cast aside because they failed to keep their mouth shut,” Lt Commander Bob “The Bodger” Badger (Kenneth More) tells one of the three inept midshipmen he has to chaperone. But he knows whereof he speaks, shunted out to a training college because of his habit of outperforming his superiors. After serial foul-ups from smart alec Carson (Derek Fowlds), lover-boy Dewberry (Jeremy Lloyd) and bruiser Bowles (Dinsdale Landen), the Bodger is bundled off with his recruits as a liaison officer on an American cruiser in the French Riviera. It’s a hard life.
Starting with More’s droll deck presence, We Joined the Navy is thoroughly relaxed (and partly filmed in the multicoloured French town of Villefranche-sur-Mer). What you initially hope might become Strangelove-style digs at military absurdity never proceed much further than mild joshing at naval rectitude, with the Bodger keeping the British end up as he effortlessly outsmarts Yank military tribunals. Even the smut is restricted to some mild smooching and, as the rap sheet has it: “improperly painting the rectum of one male dog”.
Toye, living up to her dancer’s background, does mastermind an extended – and quite racy – burlesque striptease scene; she keeps her ship of fools amiably buoyant as the British contingent redeems itself snuffing out a revolution in the republic of “Moronia”. Sid James gets a solitary dirty guffaw cameoing as a naval dance instructor, and Dirk Bogarde also briefly turns up as Simon Sparrow, his Doctor in the House staple, furthering the boys’ club feel. If you’re looking for more pointed gender commentary from Toye, More played another naval officer for her in 1955’s Raising a Riot, under heavy fire: looking after his three children solo.
• The Teckman Mystery/We Joined the Navy are released on digital platforms, DVD and Blu-ray on 21 November.
