The Playboy (1968)

D. Harry Reilly
Colour

One of Roger Moore’s first stabs at big screen stardom, sees him never stray far from his established persona as Roger Moore The Saint on the TV, which was of course the same persona he later made famous as Roger Moore James Bond.


Despite a long career, acting was never Roger Moore’s strong point and so you’d expect him to bring nothing else but his normal bag of tricks. Yet, even though Roger Moore is still so clearly playing Roger Moore, if you actually watch the film, you’ll see that incredibly he’s both wheeling out his normal debonair persona, but also subverting it at every level. Here his charm, suavity and effortless English cool aren’t the products of excellent breeding and inherent style, they’re just a façade which hides something far darker and more disturbing.

For in ‘The Playboy’, Roger Moore isn’t a gentleman thief or a gentleman spy, he’s a screwed up would-be gentleman and genuine mummy’s boy who likes nothing better than to little murder old ladies.

It’s 1968 in swinging London and Roger Moore cruises the streets in a second hand jaguar looking to meet ladies of a certain age he can woo and charm. Like a much hornier Max Bialystock, Moore is adept at making these women feel special; romancing them, wining & dining them, looking so happy to be on their arm. But the moment the dear old thing’s will is changed to reflect her new found infatuation, she’s ushered to bed by her handsome young suitor and takes a long sleep from which she’ll never awake. Irene Handl is suitably charmed, Joan Hickson is equally charmed, even visiting American former cabaret artiste Shelley Winters finds it impossible to resist. All fall asleep so full of love and passion that they never wake up to realise their mistake. It isn’t long though before the trail of corpses arouses suspicion and Detective Alex McGowan (playing essentially the same character he later did in Hitchcock’s ‘Frenzy’, but without the stilted marital bickering), starts to track his man.

Released the same year as ‘Alfie’, in many ways this serves as a darker version of that film: both being about Londoners with a taste for the ladies (including Shelley Winters, for whom 1968 was clearly a randy year around London). Yet even though the murders give it a far darker edge than ‘Alfie’, it still feels like a far older and more conservative film.

From a 1968 perspective (actually from a 2014 perspective too), Michael Caine is better cast as a modern man than his near contemporary Roger Moore. Roger Moore reeks of public school, the good tailor, the brogues. He doesn’t feel like a 1960s man, more a throwback to the 1950s, who’s only cool and young in the way Frank Sinatra was still trying to be cool and young. If ‘The Playboy’ had been released ten years earlier, its blithe mixture of that charm and murder would have made this a disturbing and genuinely memorable British film. As it was, it feels like a strange anachronism wrapped in an un-hip suit and stinking of Brylcreem.

Although watching his performance, clearly Roger Moore had more murder in his soul than he was ever encouraged to show as James Bond – and the fact he never got to use it is a dying shame. By the end of his tenure, Lois Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny was very much the right age group for this film’s version of Roger Moore. So it’s genuinely disappointing that she just disappeared from the screen, rather than being gently ushered to sleep by an OO7 gone very, very rogue.

Now, wouldn’t THAT have been a hell of an ending to ‘A View to a Kill’?