Twenty years before Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, involving a first-act where scientists William Sylvester and Robert Beatty are figuring out an enigmatic presence on the moon, the pair was grounded as polar opposite siblings in the thriller/mystery POSTMARK FOR DANGER...
Which was originally titled PORTRAIT OF ALISON, a reworking of the classic film noir LAURA in which a cop falls for a dead woman from a painting who, it turns out, is very alive...
The cop here's an artist in Beatty's Tim Forrester, a painter, while Sylvester plays a smug pilot named Jim... and the resurrected dame is MIGHTY JOE YOUNG ingenue Terry Moore, who should have appeared mysteriously, like Gene Tierney, but by the time she's revealed to the painter, we've already witnessed her ruining a portrait commissioned by her grieving father...
It's all rather complicated, and with such a great cast including future James Bond M Geoffrey Keen and a lovely yet doomed Josephine Griffin, POSTMARK simply goes through the motions without any real surprises or revelations...
Overall, Moore lacks passion while Canadian and American actors Beatty and Sylvester, working primarily in English films, are better suited for secondary or character roles.... Beatty in particular, far more suited for villains and simply too benign for the romantic lead...
Meanwhile British-born William Lucas, beginning an eclectic crime-genre career ranging from bad guys to good and in-between, is underused as a smarmy car salesman, part of a diamond smuggling ring that never feels threatening: to the characters or the audience.
Which was originally titled PORTRAIT OF ALISON, a reworking of the classic film noir LAURA in which a cop falls for a dead woman from a painting who, it turns out, is very alive...
The cop here's an artist in Beatty's Tim Forrester, a painter, while Sylvester plays a smug pilot named Jim... and the resurrected dame is MIGHTY JOE YOUNG ingenue Terry Moore, who should have appeared mysteriously, like Gene Tierney, but by the time she's revealed to the painter, we've already witnessed her ruining a portrait commissioned by her grieving father...
It's all rather complicated, and with such a great cast including future James Bond M Geoffrey Keen and a lovely yet doomed Josephine Griffin, POSTMARK simply goes through the motions without any real surprises or revelations...
Overall, Moore lacks passion while Canadian and American actors Beatty and Sylvester, working primarily in English films, are better suited for secondary or character roles.... Beatty in particular, far more suited for villains and simply too benign for the romantic lead...
Meanwhile British-born William Lucas, beginning an eclectic crime-genre career ranging from bad guys to good and in-between, is underused as a smarmy car salesman, part of a diamond smuggling ring that never feels threatening: to the characters or the audience.