Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

Borgarkeri A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Cody One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

toytrains-492-957106 This may be a black and white film is a great film, but is well worth a viewing as the three leading members of the cast were first rate and it should hold your interest throughout. Stanley Baker was a tremendous actor and plays a determined but sympathetic DI. Hardy Kruger a struggling young artist and Micheline Presle has such poise and beauty that she looked good enough to eat. Gordon Jackson also makes a believable Police Sergeant. As for the rest of the cast in this film they all have the right 1950's 'air' about them The plot has a nice number of twists and the locations in central London and around the then small London Heathrow Airport are nice and nostalgic. London as it used to be.

Leofwine_draca I wanted to like BLIND DATE but in the end I was a bit bored by the whole thing, which was a shame as the film has a decent script with strong characterisation and an excellent little cast which lifts this B-movie quite considerably. I enjoyed the way that the murder mystery story is used to explore British class issues but at the end of the day it's all rather staid and talky, which means that as a thriller it doesn't work so well.Hardy Kruger (THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX) is the erstwhile lead and plays a young and idealistic youth who turns up at a flat looking for fun. Unfortunately he finds it empty, dozes off and wakes to find out that he's being investigated for murder with a corpse in the next room. The excellent Stanley Baker is the detective doing the questioning, and he gets to use his own Welsh accent for a change. The first half of the film, in which the viewer is almost as befuddled as the Kruger character, is quite taut and inventive and makes good use of the back and forth questioning style.The second half loses the single location setting and also loses most of the suspense built up in the first section. The solution to the murder isn't really all that clever although it does allow supporting players like Robert Flemyng and John Van Eysson to shine. Gordon Jackson has an oddly small role as a copper which is strange as I saw him playing leads in other movies from the era. Jack MacGowran supplies humour and the one misstep is Micheline Presle, whose character is dullish and never really convinces as an object of lust. BLIND DATE isn't all bad and has plenty of potential, and most viewers will probably get more out of it than I did, but I just didn't connect with this film in its latter stages.

dbdumonteil At first sight ,"Blind date" recalls some Agatha Christie play.Only three characters are really important and they all have. a different nationality:Baker is English,Krüger is German (Dutch in the movie!) and Micheline Presles is French.People who know Preminger's "Laura" cannot help but be struck by the way Presles's character is used.But the essentials are somewhere else.Losey had always been fascinated by the social status,particularly the upper classes' decay:to name but three ,"the servant" ,"the gypsy and the gentleman" and "the go-between" were blatant examples.Here prole Kruger would be an ideal culprit,he who only owns one suit,thus a good way of avoiding scandal.Presles and her husband are the posh people at the top,but they are about to fall in their mire.That said,Losey's directing is a bit static,and looks like some filmed stage production.The jaunty first and last pictures seem irrelevant.

jandesimpson It can sometimes be interesting to study the early work of directors who were later to emerge as important figures in cinema. Some show little indication of what is to come (Carol Reed's "Bank Holiday " for instance) while with others the fingerprints are all there (Hitchcock's "The Lodger" and David Lynch's "Eraserhead"). Joseph Losey falls somewhere between these two extremes. An early work such as "Blind Date" has a competence and clearheaded sense of narrative flow that place it on a higher level than most B-style thrillers to emerge from British studios in the '50's but there is little of the original stamp that was to mark his later work such as "The Servant", "The Go-between" and "Accident". These films provide fascinating commentaries that an outsider from the USA brought to bear on the British class system. There is a little in "Blind Date" about the social hierarchy within the British police force, but this is peripheral to Losey's main task of presenting a neat little thriller well. He keeps the tension going nicely to begin with, with a young Dutch artist visiting a flat where he expects to find a woman he has been having a liaison with, only to find himself soon embroiled with the police. The script has a neat way of evading what is going on until some way into the film. Some of the flashbacks go on for rather too long and are somewhat weakened by a rather wooden performance by Micheline Presle as the woman of mystery. Hardy Kruger, on the other hand, as the young Dutchman is excellent. We really identify with his frustration at finding himself in a situation that is beyond his comprehension and control. As the main detective Stanley Baker plays cat and mouse with his customary skill. "Blind Date" is in so sense an important or significant film, but the fact that it was competently made by a director who was later to produce some outstanding works of British cinema makes it worth a look. There are two other good reasons for watching - photography by Christopher Challis and music by Richard Rodney Bennett - both considerable artists in their respective fields.