Making plans for Christmas Eve,I started making plans to get a film to watch from UK DVD company Network to watch with my dad on the day. Reading old issues of UK film mag Empire,I found a review for a Film Noir/Caper from the label directed by future Hammer Horror legend Terence Fisher, which led to me taking the assignment.The plot: Focusing on his painting, artist Henry Crossley waves goodbye to his wife as she goes to catch a train to spend a week with her aunt. The next day Crossley gets a call,revealing his wife never arrived at the station, and is currently missing. Learning of the case, newspaper reporters Mike Billings and Jenny Drew grab an exclusive deal to report on the case. As the police report they have found a body,Billings and Drew start picking up the whispers in town about Crossley.View on the film:Treating the assignment with dignity, Network deliver a very good transfer,with the image only having a few specs of dirt,and the soundtrack being crisp. Made in the final phase of his pre Gothic Horror era, director Terence Fisher stylishly displays flourishes hinting at what was to come, from an elegant dame laid out across the screen in the opening and the low-lighting of Film Noir making a sequence of Drew creeping round the gardens of a house carry a menacing atmosphere. Reported on in just under an hour run time, Kenneth R. Hayles adaptation of Maurice Harrison & Sidney Nelson's short story Involuntary Confession shakes Film Noir with a Caper tale,with the mutterings from the locals on the murder unveiling a town with hidden secrets, uncovered by the breezy exchanges between Drew and Billings. Snapping at each other to be the first at the typewriter, John Bentley and Hy Hazell give sparkling performances as Billings and Drew,thanks to them each giving the duo a slippery vibe in their sharp one liners exchanges on the stolen assignment.

This is a strictly routine thriller which leaves no cliché unturned.Hy Hazell and John Bentley play reporters on the same newspaper who are rivals for scoops on the murder investigation.Eddie Byrne is the detective who is pestered by the duo and tries to thwart their best efforts,There are a number of red herrings thrown in to put you off the scent.It is though all rather ruotine.One can only be grateful that the leads are not played by the usual American has beens.Hy Hazells only real claim to fame is her rather dramatic death,choking to death on a steak in a restaurant.Probably for devotees of the genre or the actors only.

I voted this 1954 "B" film a user rating of 5/10 - just about average.The leading parts were very small fry actors in the film business (producer budget constraints) but were adequate.Eddie Byrne as the police inspector was probably the best known character actor and had a joint leading role.I also recognised the actor who played the newspaper's crime reporter who played the English master in the 1951 comedy film "The Happiest Days of your Life".In the latter film (like "Stolen Assignment") he has a romantic liaison with his female opposite number (Bernadette O'Farrell) in the girls school (headmistress Margaret Rutherford) which the Ministry of Education have stupidly assigned to the same location & school as the boys public school whose head is Alastair Sim.In "Stolen Assignment" Hy Hazel plays the female reporter wishing to better herself by reporting on meatier subjects than the frivolous female subjects to which the editor of her paper keeps assigning her.One character actor who caught my eye was Raymond Rollet who played a police sergeant.In the 1950s on BBC TV Children's Hour Raymond played a character called "Mr Sly" and a church deacon in "Gone to Earth" (1949).Eddie Byrne is assisted by the newspaper duo in solving the case of the murdered artist's affluent wife who had kept the artist when she was alive.The question is can they come up with the hard evidence the police require to enable them to make an arrest rather than mere supposition? This was the sort of "B" picture you saw in British cinemas in the 1950s before the big feature you had gone primarily to see.

Stolen assignment is yet another light-hearted crime/ thriller in which a couple of newspaper reporters compete with each other to expose a murderer, and the police seem unable to do without their 'help'. A time honored theme that holds up extremely well in this ~hour long romp.The best laid plans of our villain are dismembered one by one by our intrepid pair in a movie that is genuinely absorbing. The comedic aspects never seem to interfere with the unfolding drama and when the climax is reached the pair realize, unsurprisingly, that it must be love - for a happy ending.The acting is top notch and the characters are well fleshed out.For anyone with a modicum of interest in movies of a bygone era, this is essential viewing. Four and a half, from five stars is my assessment. A Gem.