Another of the "British" movies that showed up on TubiTV and looked like it might be interesting, and that I'd never heard of before, was 90° in the Shade. So I decided to watch it in order to be able to review it here.
The movie starts off with some scenes of a hot summer day in contemporary Prague; the movie is actually a UK/Czechoslovak co-production in English, or at least all the British actors playing the leads are English, with the Czechs being dubbed into English. Eventually, the scene stops on a municipal swimming area on the Vltava River, being watched by a man named Kurka (Rudolf Hrušínský). Kurka is about to take a job as a new manager at a branch of the state alcohol monopoly (well, the store also sells non-alcoholic goods), meeting the old manager, Vorel (James Booth).
Kurka's job is to audit the place, which is going to be hell on the workers because they've all got a routine, even if that routine isn't exactly the most efficient one for a business. Not quite the "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us" joke of the old Communist bloc, but definitely relaxed and the sort of thing that would horrify a functionary new to the place. To make matters worse, Vorel is having an affair with Alena (Anne Heywood), one of the shop assistants, even though she's married. They're all worried about what Kurka will find.
Kurka seems to take joy in his job and making certain there are no violations, if only because he home life is most decidedly not a joy. He's got a wife who's an alcoholic, and a son who seems nowhere near as intelligent as Dad. Indeed, Kurka starts to suspect everything almost from the minute he gets to the shop. Alena miscounts the number of a certain type of bottle and then, on the recount, everything conveniently matches properly. Then the lights go out in the shop and when Kurka sees lights haven't gone out in other buildings, suspect there might be a ruse of some sort.
And the employees are right to be worried about what Kurka is going to find. Vorel has been smuggling expensive brandy to sell on the black market, and an audit is definitely going to find it. They're going to have to scrounge up a lot of money to replace the pilfered alcohol, or else to do something else to maintain the ruse.
After a scene of Alena trying to get the money, we get to the big audit the next morning, and find that there doesn't seem to be anything missing. At least, not until a second auditor, Bažant (Donald Wolfit). accidentally knocks over one of the bottles like Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Claude Rains' wine cellar in Notorious. It's discovered that the bottles are filled not with uranium-bearing sands, but with tea. Someone's going to have to pay for the deception, and that leads to tragedy....
90° Degrees in the Shade is the sort of movie that's not for everyone. I've mentioned in the past that I'm not the biggest fan of some of the movies from the various New Waves, and the pacing here is definitely uneven, and the use of flashbacks doesn't always help. But the basic story is a good one that mostly works, and the vintage shots of Prague, even if in black and wite, also work quite well. Indeed, at time the stark monochrom cinematography serves to make the whole place look all the seedier.
So if you like foreign films, even though this one is in English, definitely give 90° Degrees in the Shade a try.
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