BY HANK REINEKE
Blue Underground’s double-feature Blu Ray issue of Code 7… Victim 5 and Mozambique is a generous release considering
the company chose to simultaneously issue both films as standalone DVDs. Both films are among the earliest big screen
efforts of notorious exploitation producer Harry Alan Towers. Both were adapted from Tower’s own
semi-original scenarios (under his usual pseudonym of “Peter Welbeckâ€) and both
were penned by the Australian screenwriter Peter Yeldham with British director Robert
Lynn at the helm.
Both men had been working in television and, like Towers,
were now gingerly testing the waters of the international movie business. The films, modest thrillers financed by
Tower’s UK Company “Towers of London,†nonetheless share a continental roster
of technicians and actors. The films are
serviceably entertaining as thrillers, but are most ambitious in conveying a
jet-setting ‘60s ambiance. The fact that
Towers brought his international crew to southern Africa to film is the most
notable feature of both efforts.
“Africa is changing,†the ruthless drug smuggler Da Silva
sighs to a shady Arabian client in Mozambique
(1964). “The best days are
gone.†Indeed they were… or soon would
be. Just as location shooting was being
completed on this fictional thriller set in the tiny, East African province of
Mozambique, a coalition of real-life indigenous anti-colonialists and communist
guerilla fighters were combining to upset centuries-long Portuguese rule. As a decade-long bloody civil war would soon
follow in the wake of the filming of this Technicolor/Technoscope drama, it’s unlikely
that any subsequent team of filmmakers from British or continental Europe would
be warmly welcomed in the years going forward.
The South African locations of this disc’s companion film
Code 7… Victim 5 are cosmopolitan and
glittering in presentation; conversely the photography of the plaintive Mozambique
countryside captures a far more sober and undeveloped region. Aside from breathless images capturing
beautiful oceanside views - sightlines unblemished by tourist constructions -
the countryside of Mozambique circa
1963 is revealed as poor and agricultural.
The two films offered on this disc do share similarities
aside from their exotic African settings. Not the least of these is that both films open with very public
assassinations of characters mostly tangential to the film’s plotlines. Code 7
opens with the daylight murder – by a team of menacing clown-faced assassins –
during Capetown’s New Year’s Eve Carnival parade. Mozambique
opens similarly with a mysterious assassination atop the winding, ancient stone
stairwells of old Lisbon.
In Mozambique,
American actor Steve Cochran plays Brad Webster, a down-on-his-luck Cessna
pilot. We first encounter Webster as he
trawls about Lisbon’s bleak waterfront in search of employment. His blacklisting as a pilot-for-hire is
understandable as his previous assignment didn’t go all that well. Both of his passengers were killed in a crash
of his piloted small craft, leaving Webster the lone survivor.
For better or worse, his fortunes change following a
desperate, alcohol fueled fight in a waterfront saloon. Faced with a probable sixty day jail sentence
for vagrancy and public fisticuffs, Lisbon authorities mysteriously offer Webster
an alternative. A certain Colonel Valdez
residing in Mozambique is looking to hire a small-craft pilot on the down
low. The police offer Webster one-way airfare
from Lisbon to their colonial territory should he choose to accept the deal.
He does. Once aboard
his Lufthansa flight to Mozambique,
the sweating heavily, PTSD-afflicted Webster meets the comely blond Christina
(Vivi Bach). Christina too,
coincidentally, was also sent a one-way ticket at the behest of the mysterious
Colonel Valdez. So begins an improbable
romance between this middle-aged and craggy American and a beautiful young
woman in her twenties. In truth, actor
Cochran is perhaps a bit too long-in-the-tooth to pull off this charade as a
dashing hero and paramour.