Stranger in Town - 1957 film review

Stranger in Town is a black and white movie adapted from a novel by Frank Chittenden called The Uninvited. I know very little about Chittenden, but he appears to have produced five novels, generally as by F.A. Chittenden. This one appears to have been his last effort, which is surprising, as it was adapted for radio even before being filmed - a successful note to bow out on, if one assumes he gave up writing crime fiction afterwards.

The director was George Pollock, today remembered by me as the director of Murder Most Foul, the movie that introduced me to Agatha Christie. He was responsible for four Miss Marple films starring Margaret Rutherford, and also for the 1965 film Ten Little Indians, a somewhat regrettable version of Christie's finest novel. He wasn't Hitchcock, that's for sure, but he was a competent entertainer.

In this story, a moody composer is murdered, and his former girlfriend (Ann Paige) mourns him. The death is put down as suicide, but once John Madison (played by Alex Nicol) turns up and starts poking his nose in, the villagers become increasingly defensive. Surely it wasn't a case of murder? Well, we can predict the answer long before a second death occurs.

The story is so-so, and the real joy of this film lies in the supporting cast, which features actors who became more successful than the lead actors (whose performances are not terribly gripping). So we have Willoughby Goddard, so wonderful in the William Tell series a couple of years after this film came out, Harry Towb, Charles Lloyd Pack, and the marvellous Arthur Lowe all in minor parts. Not  a bad film, and I'd be interested to learn more about Chittenden.