The Brighton Strangler - 1945 film review

Brighton has been the setting for a number of excellent crime stories. Graham Greene's Brighton Rock and Patrick Hamilton's The West Pier are notable examples. In recent years, for instance, we've had books set in the resort by Peter James and Peter Guttridge, among others. There's something about the place that seems to spark the imagination of writers. And then there's a rather obscure wartime film called The Brighton Strangler, which I stumbled across on Youtube.

The film is a curiosity. I think it's reasonable to describe it as a film noir, but oddly, it's not a British film noir. It was made in the United States by RKO and directed by Max Nosseck, who had fled to the States from Germany. He had some input into the script, written by Hugh Gray and Arnold Phillips, while the stars of the movie were John Loder and June Duprez. No stellar names there, to be honest.

This is a short film which seems to have made little impact on its original release, but in recent years it has enjoyed something of a revival. One of its merits is that its brevity (67 minutes) mean that the story moves at a fast pace. And there's quite a lot going on. The cleverest part of the whole script comes at the beginning, when a melodramatic murder is committed - and then we realise that it's the climax of a play in the theatre. However, the play is running during the Blitz, and when the theatre is bombed, the lead actor (Loder) suffers a head injury. Affected by amnesia, he becomes a killer, following the pattern of the character in the play...

The scriptwriters were no Graham Greenes and it's not too difficult to find fault with the film. The fact it was shot in America does mean that we don't get any meaningful sense of Brighton at all. I wasn't impressed with Loder's acting, I'm afraid, whereas June Duprez makes the best of an under-written role and Miles Mander is good as the lead detective. But when a film is as short as this, and packed with incident, it probably makes for better entertainment than one of those interminable six or eight or ten part TV serials where the plot material is padded out for purely commercial reasons. And there's room in the world for intriguing curiosities.