Escort for Hire (1960) User Reviews (4)

To Escort the Main Feature

[boblipton · 5/10 · 9 October 2017]

Pete Murray and Noel Trevarthen are unsuccessful actors who become escorts. While Noel is waiting for one of his regulars to finish dressing, he discovers she has been murdered. Instead of calling the police, he wipes the room of his fingerprints and seeks the aid of Pete, and his employer, June Thorburn. When the police track down the agency in about eighteen seconds, they cover up for him and then, because he is such an obvious suspect, agree to lie to the police and help him investigate.

Once you accept this unlikely and unhelpful beginning, it turns into a decent enough B movie, barring the set design. Unlike most of the Danziger Brothers' productions, this is in Technicolor .... and the designer decided to take advantage of this fact by using bright colors of every sort and by giving Mr. Murray a bit of a hat fetish; although he is second billed (after Miss Thorburn), he is the goofy sidekick in the movie.

Like many of the Danziger Brother productions of the era, it's a decent enough time waster, and was clearly intended to fill out a full program of two features and selected short subjects as cheaply as possible.

Not one of Danzigers best

[malcolmgsw · 5/10 · 2 November 2018]

Well there are three things that irritated me about this film.First was the garish technicolour.Presumably they wanted to sell it to tv.Secondly Pete Murray with his cowboy hathe and dreadful mid Atlantic accent.Thirdly Peter Butterworth constantly chewing gum.A detective he most certainly is not.The film seems to start out as a light comedy and the becomes a murder mystery.However it really fails to generate any tension or excitement..One can also say that technicolour really did not lend itself to this sort of film.It detracts from the atmosphere.

And a good movie for sleep...

[searchanddestroy-1 · 26 April 2009]

Really nothing special about this feature. A little UK mystery produced by the Danzigers, in 1960, and in color !!!The story is rather unusual, I admit. An unemployed actor finds a job in an agency which recruits escort men for wealthy women....

And our lead escort guy has to play the detective to find the murderer of the woman he had to look after. Besides, you can turn the TV set off. I don't know the actors, but I have already seen some movies directed by Godfray Grayson, real crime movies, as far as I remember. Better than this one, I am sure

Really nothing special here.

He should have remained an audience, not an actor.

[mark.waltz · 3/10 · 1 March 2022]

Okay, I don't think I ever want to hear that bouncy score that plays over and over from the opening credits through the ending in this movie ever again. It's really inappropriate for a horrific murder, and makes it obvious that there's something else going on besides what rather dim-witted suspect believes. Noel Trevarthen is one of two actor buddies who goes to work for a female run escort service, and after numerous dates with the attractive Jan Holden who ends up being strangled. The head of the agency (June Thorburn) stands by him even though she had made it clear that there was to be no hanky-panky between her boys and her clients. Reading a plot line of this, you think it was a low budget British mystery, and indeed, there is no mystery there, but it's all so absurd.

The farce in this is played up over the mystery, and that makes it really jarring from the start when you realize what the structure of the film is going to be. It's done in a rather garish color that isn't flattering for the actors, and the script feels like it was rushed together with editing that jumps from scene to scene without a decent flow. A second rate cast along with poor directiom makes this a strange little quota quickie that might have been better along the lines of the quickly made Edgar Wallace films that dominated British neighborhood Cinemas and later television for years. As a comedy mystery, it seems like one of those tedious British plays that toured around small community theaters which ended up being spoofed as "Something's Afoot!" and "Noises Off". In fact, this ends up being a noisy little programmer to and even though it's just under 70 minutes.