cult film freak: MICHAEL CAINE IN 'SOLO FOR SPARROW' STARRING GLYN HOUSTON

Michael Caine in SOLO FOR SPARROW Year: 1962 Rating: ***

Most of the early/mid 1960's crime b-movies from England that wound up on the television anthology EDGAR WALLACE MYSTERIES feels like their own stories with a beginning, middle and end while SOLO FOR SPARROW feels like a pilot for a rather unique kind of police detective...

Played by sturdily stocky British character-actor Glynn Houson, whose manliness allowed a few glimpses into semi leading man status, bringing a cute bartender chick on a stakeout for the rich owner of a jewelry store, robbed by a gang that includes Michael Boles, who could play both robbers and cops with equal offbeat intensity, and young no-name Michael Caine...

Michael Coles in SOLO FOR SPARROW

As usual, the opening entails the heist... actually a kidnapping of an old lady whose key opens and closes the jewelry store... whose death prompts Houston's SPARROW into thinking her new job description makes otherwise sophisticated owner (and strangely first-billed) Anthony Newlands suspect of ripping off his own till...

Not quite a gangster flick as potentially intriguing villains (from a stylized pool-hall's hustler Neil McCarthy to fatale-like beauty Nadja Regin) come and go, and not an altogether mystery since this culprit is obvious in Newlands' usual criminal casting, SOLO is a deliberately slow-paced study in what are the borderline crooked investigatory devices of our titular hero... not once ruffled, even when he himself is kidnapped: lacking suspense in both the character and the story, but a nice little programmer nonetheless.