User Reviews

One year after being put behind bars by Marty Hopkirk (Kenneth Cope), the dangerous criminal Eric Jansen (George Sewell) goes over the wall to get even with him. But when he discovers that Marty has since passed away, he turns his attentions to his widow Jeannie (Annette Andre) instead. Jeff (Mike Pratt) and Marty do all they can to find Jansen before he catches up with her, but all lines of enquiry draw a blank. However, they do discover that Jeannie's new boyfriend, the wealthy businessman Emil Cavallo-Smith (Barrie Ingham) is already married and wonder if he might be working for Eric Jansen. But, the criminal lunatic takes Cavallo-Smith prisoner and forces him to make a phone call luring Jeannie to his flat above the cold storage plant he owns. Jeannie gives her police escort the slip and finds herself alone with the madman who takes her to the cliff top where her husband cornered him exactly a year ago planning to send her to her death by pushing her off the cliff edge. Jeff and Marty arrive at the cold storage plant to find that Jansen has put Cavallo-Smith into one of the refrigerators and is close to death. But, Marty is able to communicate with his spirit and gets him to reveal where Jansen has taken Jeannie. But, is it already too late?

All in all, Vendetta For A Dead Man may not be top notch Randall And Hopkirk but it is still a lot of fun. George Sewell stands out as the psychotic Jansen making him believable and Timothy West puts in appearance as one of his heavies. There is an amusing fight between the latter and Jeff in his rickety little office, which literally falls apart as a result of it. Annette Andre's Jeannie gets more to do in this one, but her role is upstaged by the comedy element provided by Kenneth Cope as her husband who is jealous that his widow is contemplating getting married again. "It's bigamy!", he shrieks forgetting that he is dead and therefore it cannot be because they are no longer married in the eyes of the law. In addition, the great on screen chemistry between Pratt and Cope is still there. Barrie Ingham is quite good as the smooth businessman with a roving eye, Cavallo-Smith, who we later discover is already married and was simply leading Jeannie on into thinking that he was about to propose marriage to her. And, in a reasonably suspenseful climax at the cold storage plant, he refuses to tell Jeff and Marty where Jansen has taken Jeannie concerned only about his "position". He refers to her as just "some girl" after he had lead her on the way he did and is ready to concede that she must already be dead. Furious, the pair throw him back into the fridge and wait for the exact moment where he will be near death so that Marty can have a man to man talk with him. And it is only through fear of losing his own life that he finally tells Marty where Jansen is. Cyril Frankel does his usual proficient directing job and stages one or two suspenseful moments such as Jeannie's narrow escape with Jansen in a hall of mirrors at a fairground and the cliff top finale is reasonably tense despite it obviously being a studio set intercut with stock footage of the sea battering the cliffs.