Don't Talk to Strange Men - 1962 film review

Of all the British black and white B movies that Talking Pictures has screened in recent months, Don't Talk to Strange Men is one of the most gripping. The film first hit the screens in 1962, and it' not much more than an hour long. It doesn't boast a starry cast, and I'd never heard of the scriptwriter, Gwen Cherrell. But in terms of building tension, it puts many a big budge movie to shame

One of the features of the script is its economy. In the first scene, we see a girl being picked up on a lonely road. Soon a body is found by a group of children. We never learn more about the victim,and indeed we learn next to nothing about the murderer - not even what he looks like. The real question is: where will he strike next?

Two sisters play central parts in the story. They come from a "nice" middle class family, and they chafe against the restrictions imposed by their kindly but relatively old parents. Christina Gregg plays the dreamy romantic Samantha, who runs into danger when she answers a phone ringing in a telephone kiosk. Her younger sister, played by Janina Faye, also gets enmeshed in Samantha's web of deceit with potentially disastrous results.

Christina Gregg was 22 when the film was made, though she played a teenager. She does very well in the role, but appears to have married in the year the film was made,and given up acting; quite a loss. The best known faces in the supporting cast belong to Conrad Phillips, for once not playing a villain, and Dandy Nicholls, later to find fame as Alf Garnett's wife. This taut little film gives as clear a picture of conventional British society just before the Beatles era than you'll find in many a history book.

Town on Trial - film review

I'm rather surprised to find that I don't seem to have mentioned Town on Trial, one of my favourite Fifties British crime films on this blog before. I first saw, and liked, the movie when I was quite young and I've enjoyed it a number of times since. One new thought occurred to me on the latest viewing the other day was that, in essentials, it is rather like a forerunner of Broadchurch. A tough, troubled cop comes to a small town to investigate a murder, and finds several skeletons in the closets of the locals, who close ranks against him.

Suffice to say that I enjoyed Town on Trial just as much as I enjoyed Broadchurch, although of course the latter benefits from the cliffhangers of a serial, and high quality production values. Taking the role in the film equivalent to David Tennant's in the TV show is John Mills, master of the stiff upper lip, as a cop who fancies the American niece of one of the suspects, a local doctor.

A girl is strangled and Mills soon makes himself unpopular, antagonsing the local Casanova and doyen of the tennis club as well as a number of other worthies. One of them, the repressive father of a pretty young girl who was friendly with the deceased, is played by Geoffrey Keen, who specialised in gruff hard man roles in film and TV for many years. I remember him best from The Troubleshooters, which is going back a very long time. But he also featured in six James Bond films.

The decisive clue to the killer's identity is one that has always stuck in my mind. I don't know a great deal about the screenplay writers, Ken Hughes and Robert Westerby, but the script is smoothly professional and they both did plenty of film work. Mills is as good as usual, but it's sad that Barbara Bates, his love interest, was evidently a troubled woman who later committed suicide. Elizabeth Seal, the young woman desperate to escape the nest, soon gave up acting, which was a pity, but other cast members including Raymond Huntley and Dandy Nicholls enjoyed successful careers. All in all, an entertaining, well-made film -and recognising that similarity to Broadchurch reminds me how fascinated we are by crime in "closed" communities.