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 audit as Heywood and Hrusinsky check the shelves in the stock room and Booth tries to delay the process by cutting the power to the shop. Overnight, they try to cover their tracks but the fraud is uncovered almost by accident. While the discovery looks like another triumph for the logical Hrusinsky, it’s an embarrassment for the avuncular Wolfit who’s had the wool pulled over his eyes. For Heywood and Booth it’s a potential tragedy. To say more would be to give away the end of the movie, although it’s safe to say no-one ends unchanged. Even Hrusinsky is left with the frustration of knowing what happened but being unable to prove it. 



Director Jiri Weiss fell out with the producer (Anne Heywood’s husband) over the production of the movie, so that the English and Czech versions have many differences (although the basic story is the same). The Blu ray set released by Powerhouse Films has both versions, along with background documentaries. James Booth is excellent as the coercive, self-centred rat at the centre of the fraud.


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