cult film freak: PETER MAXWELL'S 'BLIND SPOT' ROBERT MACKENZIE & MICHAEL CAINE

Robert MacKenzie in BLIND SPOT Year: 1958 Rating: ***1/2

By the time a young Michael Caine's much anticipated wild-card-airplane-pilot character's revealed with a gun drawn to his own sister, BLIND SPOT has one quick car chase and it's over...

Leaving most of the gumshoe-inspired/traipsing-from-interior-to-interior screen-time to military man Robert MacKenzie, who's blind when he literally knocks into two killers after being dropped off in the wrong house, and then, after his sight's back, he investigates what's behind the murder...

Robert MacKenzie in BLIND SPOT with Ann Sharp

A remake of the 1950 British Film Noir BLACKOUT, seeming like a made-for-TV vehicle in the deliberately sparse camera style of merely facing the actors spouting loads of exposition...

But what makes this subtle thriller work is MacKenzie's affably cool yet randomly urgent aura, a hybrid of American-working-in-England b-crime regular William Sylvester and legendary American noir actor Sterling Hayden...

Robert MacKenzie and Delphi Lawrence in BLIND SPOT

He's searching for the two lethal goons alongside their possible victim's super-cute little-sister Anne Sharp, more girl-next-door helpful than the kind of sultry chain-smoking fatale given to Delphi Lawrence, needing far more screen-time for both her and the contrasting good girl to matter...

Overall the pacing is economical, the investigation's intriguing and the side-actors are all beyond capable... including gregarious airline mechanic Gordon Jackson, John Crawford the initial sight-saving doctor, and the deadly duo of strategic plan-man George Pastell and scar-faced thug Ronan O'Casey, both seeming game for a slightly bigger budgeted noir in which this Peter Maxwell-directed programmer imitates surprisingly well.