Blind Date (1959 film)

Blind Date is a 1959 British black-and-white crime thriller directed by Joseph Losey, released in the United States under the title Chance Meeting. Adapted by Ben Barzman and Millard Lampell from Leigh Howard's novel, the film stars Hardy Krüger as a Dutch painter in London suspected of murdering diplomat Sir Howard Fenton's French mistress, Jacqueline Cousteau; Jan's actual lover is Lady Fenton, who has assumed Jacqueline's identity.^{1 • 2 • 4}

Production and personnel

The film was Losey's sixth British feature and the one most likely, in one retrospective judgment, to reboot his career.¹² Losey had left the United States after being accused of communist sympathies during the McCarthy era, and worked in England under his own name from Time Without Pity (1957) onward.³ Blind Date was also his first collaboration with the Welsh actor Stanley Baker, who went on to make four films with him.^{13 • 10}

The credited crew included cinematographer Christopher Challis, editor Reginald Mills, and composer Richard Rodney Bennett, credited as Richard Bennett.³ The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum holds the production's papers, including a first treatment by Stephen Grenfell, a second-draft screenplay by Eric Ambler dated 8 August 1958, and the February 1959 draft by Barzman and Lampell.²

Class and style

Class conflict as the real subject. Losey himself said the plot did not interest him at all, which is as well, since on the level of thriller it is completely implausible; he used the genre frame to tell another story within the story.¹⁴ In a 1963 Films and Filming remark quoted by scholars, he explained that because the story was trite and contrived, he felt it essential to give it as much interest in observation and reality as possible, and to make the characters very rich.¹⁵ He had wanted the artist to be a self-made coalminer who painted from memory, and Baker's inspector to be a Welsh working-class man caught in a rigid old-boy class structure, sharing with the Dutchman a passionate desire for the truth.¹⁵

Contemporary critics noticed the same emphasis. Isabel Quigly, writing in The Spectator on 28 August 1959, found the plot mechanics preposterous but called the film the best entertainment of the week's police thrillers, praising Baker's detective, at social odds with his colleagues because his father was a chauffeur, who sorts people into what he calls 'givers' and 'takers'.¹⁶ Sight and Sound in 1959 termed it a "well-made if illogical whodunit, laced with sex, class feeling and hints of corruption at Scotland Yard."¹⁵ In a later retrospective, Time Out judged that the screenplay may lack dramatic strength, yet Losey's sharp eye for his characters through the lenses of class struggle and sexual fixation lends the movie a sharpness missing from most British-based filmmakers of that era.⁴

Challis's cinematography is frequently singled out: isolated lighting, deep focus, and elongated shadows in the noir manner, with Presle often filmed in near silhouette, her face half-consumed by darkness.⁶ The film was shot on location in London, and the Reelstreets then-and-now project has matched scenes on Victoria Embankment, in Parliament Square, and in Wilton Row, where a location visitor returned 64 years after filming.⁷

Place in Losey's career

Blind Date belongs to the run of Losey's first English features released under his own name, Time Without Pity (1957), The Gypsy and the Gentleman (1957), Blind Date (1959), and The Criminal (1960), each an initial stab at exploring the codes of the British class system, a project that reached full fruition in the Harold Pinter-scripted films of the 1960s.¹⁷ One scholar has called it the most underrated of Losey's films.¹⁵ Critics of the magazine Movie cited it, alongside Time Without Pity and The Criminal, as evidence that Losey could transcend mediocre screenplays and studio limitations through sheer talent.¹⁴

Reception and afterlife

The film holds a 6.7/10 rating on IMDb from about 1,100 votes.¹⁸ Most reference sources date it to 1959, though the Harvard Film Archive and the Torino Film Festival retrospectives list it as 1958.^{10 • 19} The title has been reused several times, including Blake Edwards's 1987 comedy with Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger and Stanley Tucci's 2009 drama with Patricia Clarkson, neither related to Losey's film.^{20 • 21}

References

1. Chance Meeting (1959), IMDb
2. 'Blind Date' Treatment and Screenplays, Bill Douglas Cinema Museum
3. Chance Meeting review, Dennis Schwartz Reviews
4. Blind Date (1959), Time Out
5. Blind Date, filmportal.de
6. Blind Date (1959) – Film Noir, classicfilmnoir.com
7. Blind Date, Reelstreets
8. Blind Date (1959), FilmAffinity
9. Blind Date (1959), The Movie Database
10. Blind Date (AKA Chance Meeting), Harvard Film Archive
11. A Common Language, Film Noir Foundation
12. Blind Date (UK 1959), itp Global Film
13. Classic Retrospective: Joseph Losey, San Sebastián Film Festival
14. British Cinema of the 1950s: A Celebration, OAPEN
15. Losey Revisited, Senses of Cinema
16. Cinema, The Spectator, 28 August 1959
17. A Question of Background, in Joseph Losey, Cambridge University Press
18. Chance Meeting, Sinekatalog
19. Blind Date, Torino Film Festival
20. Blind Date (2009), Rotten Tomatoes
21. Blind Date (1987), Rotten Tomatoes

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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