cult film freak: BRITISH FILM NOIR 'SPIN A DARK WEB' ORIGINALLY 'SOHO INCIDENT'

Title: SPIN A DARK WEB Year: 1956 Rating: ***

A sort of British version of 711 OCEAN DRIVE has a young naïve tech expert hired to wire up a horse race betting scheme so the villains can get the inside tip straight from the bookie's mouth...

Yet it begins like a boxing noir since the lanky and passive Canadian import Lee Patterson is a wannabe prizefighter set with a girl-next-door girlfriend, daughter of a trainer and his fighter son... the latter killed by a no-good hood played by Bernard Fox before his signature mustache made him an endearing magical character-actor...

His gruff character here breaking SPIN A DARK WEB into two parts: one has our hero sent by plan-plotting criminals Martin Benson and Robert Arden to pay or catch or maybe even kill hideaway Fox while working out the aforementioned con...

And there needed more of the first as the sting/con gets too complicated while the best scenes, in and out of actual Soho London streets/locales, clash with phony-looking rear-projection driving... thankfully there's less of the latter. And like all Noirs it's a sexy (American) femme fatale who makes our blank-slate boy turn savage-sappy while he neglects the (British) good girl who knew him first... but she isn't very interesting... and token wildcard Faith Domergue doesn't have enough time to SPIN that DARK titular WEB with all those literal wires getting crossed and uncrossed, again and again.