AllMovie

Dick Barton, Special Agent (1948) is one of the worst espionage thrillers ever made and, indeed, perhaps one of the worst movies ever made in England, a great irony as it marked the screen debut of the British radio hero Dick Barton, a distant precursor to Ian Fleming's James Bond and a hugely popular character at the time. The producers and writers evidently couldn't work out the thrills and comic relief, nor did they seem to know how to structure a basic movie script. In addition, director Alfred Goulding seemed unable to handle either set of scenes effectively, so everything about the movie is off-kilter except for the basic plot about former Nazis trying to release an outbreak of cholera in postwar England. Indeed, the movie is so badly made that it's funny to watch as an unintentionally comical exercise in filmmaking, as in "Don't let this happen to you." For the curious, the problems here even manage to transcend the deficiencies found in the work of Edward D. Wood Jr., who suddenly doesn't seem so shy of talent.