Hammer Film Productions, in business in the United Kingdom since 1935, took an important step forward in 1951 by inking a deal with American producer Alexander Paal to feature Hollywood actors in its subsequent releases. (Hammer had established a precedent for this gambit in its first year with The Mystery of the Mary Celeste, which headlined Dracula (1931) star Béla Lugosi, who was then having trouble finding work in the States.) Robert Preston took the lead in Cloudburst (1951) and was followed by Richard Carlson in Whispering Smith Hits London (1952), George Brent in The Last Page (1952), Zachary Scott in Wings of Danger (1952), Paul Henreid and Lizabeth Scott in Stolen Face (1952), and Cesar Romero in Lady in the Fog (US: Scotland Yard Detective, 1952). Unhappy with his lot as a Warner Brothers contract player, Dane Clark sailed for Europe after World War II to star in the French thriller La traqué (US: Gunman in the Streets, 1950) and hopped the channel to England for Roy Ward Baker's Cold War caper Highly Dangerous (1951). Taking advantage of Clark's working vacation, Hammer enlisted him to star in its crime thriller The Gambler and the Lady (1952).

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