If bronze statues are so hard to make look like the intended subject, why do people keeping making them?  As I write this, NBA star Dwayne Wade has been immortalized in that form, and the finished product looks uncannily closer to Kelsey Grammer.

A similarly daft statue is unveiled at the research facility at the center of 1960 UK thriller Suspect.  I don’t know who the man and child are supposed to be in this work, but the ghastly figures appear to be made of layers of sliced American cheese, then left in the sun for a few hours before being coated in molten metal.

This is unveiled at a research facility by a high-ranking government official (Raymond Huntley) as an apparent peace offering for preventing Peter Cushing and his team of scientists for publishing their breakthrough.  I didn’t fully grasp the nature of that work, but it seemed to be a fighting-fire-with-fire approach to prevent bubonic plague and typhus.  I thought that’s what vaccines are, but the product of this research appear to be more drastic than those, and there is fear enemies could use these as a biological weapon.

I’m honestly surprised any work gets down at that facility, what with there being such endless shenanigans as Spike Milligan’s janitor constantly getting his flat cap eaten by a chimp.  In the end, the chimp will inexplicably have locked Milligan in its cage.  At least that prevents the comedian from going around the halls while doing a walk only suitable for a certain Python sketch.  I started wondering if this was The Ministry of Silly Walks and Center for Germ Warfare.

Even more frustrated than Milligan are the actual scientists.  When Cushing isn’t railing against the government preventing him publishing, he’s making tirades about women, saying they can’t be scientists because all they’re concerned about in their reproductive years are having babies or not having them.  That regressive point of view raised my eyebrows, but not as much as fellow scientist Tony Britton expressing a sentiment not unlike that of Nazi Germany, when he declares an armless man to have no benefit to society.  Gee, I wonder if Britton has any thoughts about a special camp where maybe they could send such people.

That armless man is played by Ian Bannen, an actor I have always found odd.  He’s good in such offbeat roles as this, where his character is obviously in deep despair after losing those limbs in Korea.  His fiancée (Virginia Maskell) lives with him and provides assistance, even if they aren’t married.  That dependency on her has fermented into resentment.

Maskell is the sole female scientist at the institute around which everything centers here.  She’s the one Cushing was going off about earlier.  Her work partner is Britton, and he wants to partner with her in a non-professional capacity as well.  Since she is committed to Bannen, it seems that relationship is little more than a flirtation.  As she tells Bannen, “He’s the kind of person who just wants to hold hands in the cinema.”  The man who was an aspiring concert pianist before losing his arms replies, “Don’t we all?”

Seeking a way to make his mark on the world, Bannen will grease the wheels for the lab’s secrets to be stolen.  Donald Pleasance is his criminal liaison, in the kind of greasy, schemey role he excelled in. 

Curiously, what I will retain the most about Suspect is one character using a round trash can as an actually repository for case files he’s actively working.  I have heard the phrase “file it in the circular filing cabinet” for putting something in a filing cabinet, but this the first I have seen somebody literally using a refuse bin for that purpose.

Dir: John and Roy Boulting

Starring Tony Britton, Virginia Maskell, Peter Cushing

Watched as part of Severin Video’s blu-ray box set Cushing Curiosities