Ninety Degrees In The Shade
90 Degrees In The Shade isn’t a film about Customs or Excise (or even VAT) but I think it’s a very vivid dramatization of the experience of an audit. Donald Wolfit and Rudolf Hrusinsky The film was made in 1965 as a pioneering co-production between Britain and communist Czechoslovakia (the Czech title Tricet Jedna Ve Stinu restores the temperature to Celsius) with the script co-written by David Mercer. Anne Heywood and James Booth play employees in a Czech state grocery store, who have been selling off the stock of brandy and replacing them with bottles of cold tea. Booth’s character is the prime-mover in the fraud and has been having an affair with Heywood. Czech stage star Rudolf Hrusinsky and Britain’s Sir Donald Wolfit play inspectors who come in to audit the stock. Wolfit’s character is part of the local management, laid back and friendly. Hrusinsky has been sent in from head office as a meticulous ‘scalp-hunter.’ The movie recreates the combined tension and tediousness of an