Put into production under the working title The Money, with distribution to be handled in the United Kingdom by Hammer's parent company, Exclusive Films, and by Lippert in the United States, The Gambler and the Lady finds Clark playing an American expatriate, an alcoholic in recovery from his demons and in flight from a manslaughter charge back home after killing a man in a drunken bar fight. Though he runs an illegal gambling parlor, Clark's contrite but ambitious Jim Forster dreams of going legitimate, a business model that puts him in the categorical company of the upwardly mobile mobsters played by Al Pacino in The Godfather, Part 2 (1974) and Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday (1980) - though one senses as well the echo of doomed wrestling tout Richard Widmark in Jules Dassin's London-set noir Night and the City (1950). Overseeing production of The Gambler and the Lady was another American expat, the prolific B-movie director Sam Newfield, who had impressed the company with his work on Lady in the Fog. To work around a labor quota limiting the number of British films that could be directed by foreigners, Hammer had Newfield share onscreen credit with dialogue director Pat Jenkins; Newfield took no credit at all for writing The Gambler and the Lady's literate, class conscious screenplay.
Though The Gambler and the Lady was not a hit, Hammer continued to profit in the main by the further importation of American talent such as Richard Conte, Lloyd Bridges, Louis Hayward, Dan Duryea, Forrest Tucker, and Howard Duff. (Clark returned twice more to the Hammer fold in Murder by Proxy and Five Days [both 1954].) Duff's The Naked City (1948) costar Don Taylor headlined Men of Sherwood Forest (1954), Hammer's first color film, and Brian Donlevy starred as Professor Quatermass in The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (US: Enemy from Space, 1957). The success of the Quatermass films persuaded the company to shift production toward science fiction and Gothic horror, a tack that paid handsomely with the box office receipts from Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (US: Horror of Dracula, 1958). Though it rates little more than footnote status in the story of Hammer Film Productions, The Gambler and the Lady remains significant for marking the company's permanent encampment at Down Place, an 18th Century country home on the banks of the River Thames. Hammer would rename the site Bray Studios in honor of the neighboring village and conduct business there for many years, before shifting to more expansive soundstages in 1966.
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Hammer Films: An Exclusive Filmography by Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio (McFarland & Company, Inc., 1995)
Dane Clark obituary by Tom Vallance, The Independent, September 17, 1988
