cult film freak: ZENA WALKER WITH KENNETH COPE IN 'CHANGE PARTNERS'

Zena Walker in CHANGE PARTNERS Year: 1965 Rating: ***1/2

Zena Walker is one of the most underrated British actresses from the 1960's, specializing in natural-looking good girls in kitchen sink crime films, like THE MARKED ONES, but in CHANGE PARTNERS she's anything but...

And in this hour-long programmer that became part of THE EDGAR WALLACE MYSTERIES, Zena plays the coolest and coldest, most calculating femme fatales around...

Zena Walker and Basil Henson in CHANGE PARTNERS

The plot is highly reminiscent of many noirs of the 1940's and 1950's, especially when she asks her smitten lover, who's the big time business partner of her husband, if he'll do anything for her, which always means, basically, kill my man: so that "we can" both be together, with his money...

As in this case it's indeed purely financial, and not a bad plan: luring both spouses... his mousy wife and her moody husband... into the same car where they'd die in the style of 1930's proto-noir BORDERTOWN (that would become THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT): death by carbine monoxide asphyxiation in a closed-door garage...

Kenneth Cope and Basil Henson in CHANGE PARTNERS

But the first of two terrific twists is that, the entire time, from their initial planning stages in a rural cabin, two young lowlife blackmailers are watching their every move...

Providing crime genre regular Kenneth Cope and girlfriend Pamela Ann Davy (the latter getting more important with time) strange peripheral roles, almost like they're audience members instead of characters: eventually changing the course of the seemingly perfect murders...

Zena Walker in CHANGE PARTNERS

So while otherwise classy, vulnerable weak-link killing-partner Basil Henson starts coming unglued, Zena Walker's strategic aloofness and nefarious professionalism is worth a full-length, bigger-budgeted crime-flick, where she would have shined without the rather constrained, literally episodic nature of what fit more into a television anthology than flickering on the big screen...

Only don't tell that to an actress playing an uncompromising character without limits, and that you'll wish doesn't fall into the usual crime-doesn't-pay turnout: because if formidable level-headedness were a virtue, she'd be evil immaculate.