The Frightened Man

In my last set of DVD purchases from Amazon, I splurged and spent a few buck on this DVD set of British B movies, none of which I'd heard of before. Over the weekend, I fired up the DVD player and watched The Frightened Man.

Rosselli (Charles Victor) is an antiques dealer in London, although it seems to be a rather unfashionable part of London. He's scrimped and saved, and then some, to send his son Julius (Dermot Walsh) off to Oxford so that Julius can do better than he did. Among other problems, it seems as though one of Rosselli's employees may have obtained some stolen goods and tried to sell them at the store.

Things are about to get worse for Rosselli, though, as Julius has been expelled from Oxford and returned to London. Rosselli would like for Julius to join him as a partner in the store, but Julius would like an easier life than that. It's not as if good jobs are easy to find, however. And it's going to be more difficult for Julius in that he's fallen in love with one of Dad's boarders Amanda (Barbara Murray) and is planning to marry her, this without having a good job.

A friend offers Julius a job driving a truck, but it's really a job driving the getaway truck after a robbery, which is a problem since that's rather illegal. Bringing things full circle, another of the group of people in on the heist is the guy from Dad's antiques shop who was involved with the stolen goods. But the heist pays the rent, so to speak, and Julius gets involved with more stuff, with the climax coming when Amanda's boss is set to handle a shipment of diamonds. The police have been on the case for some time, too....

I had never heard of this movie, and to be honest, I don't think I'd heard of the main cast members. For some reason I feel like I should recognize director Jack Gilling's The Man Inside, but none of Dermot Walsh's movies look familiar at all. That having been said, I found The Frightened Man to be a surprisingly good B movie. It's not as good as A movies and clearly is lacking in production values, but it's not a bad little movie at all.

As for the box set, it's bare bones. The print of The Frightened Man is probably about the best one can hope for, since it's a B movie, but it looks in the opening title as though a very tiny slice of the bottom might have been cut off. It's not also the crispest print, but it's more than watchable. The packaging is pretty good, with three DVDs (two movies to a disc) each on their own spindle although one is a two-sided spindle. The one odd thing is that after The Frightened Man ended the DVD continued into the other movie on the disc. Still, for the price, if the other movies are anywhere near as good, I'd happily recommend the set.