The House Across the Lake - 1954 film review

I didn't know what to expect when I settled down to watch a British crime film from 1954. But The House Across the Lake turned out to be set around Windermere, and featured a struggling crime writer as the conflicted protagonist. Needless to say, this premise grabbed my attention right away!

Alex Nicol plays Mark Kendrick, an American writer based in the UK (for unexplained reasons) who rents a place in the Lakes as he tries to meet a deadline for his latest book. He encounters a blonde femme fatale, also played by an American, Hillary Brooke. She happens to be married to a rich man - played (rather to my amazement) by Sid James, in a rare straight role. She's well-known for dallying with other men, and Kendrick befriends the husband but becomes besotted by the wife - rather surprisingly, since the husband's daughter from an earlier marriage, played by Susan Stephen, seems much more appealing.

Anyway, we are in classic film noir territory here. The storyline owes a great deal to Double Indemnity, although it's based on a book called High Wray by Ken Hughes, who directs the film (and later directed many others, including Chitty, Chitty, Bang Bang). Although it's not very original, it's well done, at least until the very rushed finale, which I found anti-climactic.

There's fun to be had in spotting the other cast members -including Joan Hickson, Paul Carpenter, John Sharp, and Alan Wheatley (later famed as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood). I hoped the titular house would prove to be Wray Castle, which I enjoyed visiting a few years back, but it wasn't to be. However, I did enjoy this short film. Definitely worth watching. Why was it called Heat Wave when released in the US? Your guess is as good as mine.

The Narrowing Circle - 1955 film review

I first read Julian Symons' novel The Narrowing Circle when I was a teenager, but until recently I was unaware that in 1955 it was filmed. The screenplay was written by Doreen Montgomery, a very experienced writer for film and television, who is said to have created the character of Emma Peel for The Avengers.

The novel is a good example of post-war psychological suspense fiction. Symons was one of the British pioneers in this field, although his fiction is much less well-known than that of Patricia Highsmith,the legendary American writer, whose work he much admired. The story charts the battle of wits and wills between writer Paul Nelson and the relentless Inspector Crambo.

The film is more conventional, and in terms of both plot and style, it owes almost as much to that Cornwell Woolrich classic Phantom Lady as it does to Symons' novel. A colleague of Nelson's wins promotion at Nelson's expense, and for good measure nicks Nelson's girlfriend. When he is found dead in Nelson's apartment, Nelson relies on an alibi. He'd gone off to drown his sorrrows, picked up a prostitute, and spent the night in a seedy hotel. But when Crambo checks the alibi, the chap at the hotel denies all knowledge of Nelson, and the girl cannot be found.

The story is told with some pace, which compensates for the flimsiness of one or two of the plot twists. I don't know what Symons made of it, though I suspect he wouldn't have been thrilled by its lack of subtlety. But it's a perfectly watchable British B movie, with Paul Carpenter as Nelson and Hazel Court as a woman who falls for him and then helps solve the mystery, with such stalwarts as Basil Dignam, Russell Napier and Ronnie Stevens in the cast.

The Hypnotist - film review

The Hypnotist is a 1957 British film, which in the US was given the title Scotland Yard Dragnet. I don't think The Hypnotist is an ideal title, but the American alternative is terrible. Thankfully, the film itself is pretty good. It doesn't seem excessively stagey, even though it was based on a play by Falkland Cary, who apparently was an obstetrician before he turned to delivering work for the theatre.

Paul Carpenter plays Valentine Neal, who is involved in a flying accident and suffers an inexplicable psychological trauma as a result. His fiancee, Patricia Roc (who was a very celebrated actress in her day) finds the medics stumped by his condition, so she seeks help from a family friend, Dr Pelham (Roland Culver) who is an expert on getting to the root of psychological problems.

The murder mystery that develops from there is straightfoward in some respects,but I felt that the director, Montgomery Tully, made pretty good use of the material. Admittedly, an interlude in which our hero loses his memory and gets involved with a pretty girl he meets in a jazz club seemed more like a commercial for Chris Barber's Jazz Band than something that contributed to the plot, but the story held my attention better than many with a much bigger budget.

In researching the film, I found that Carpenter, sadly, died quite young and in rather tragic circumstances. On this evidence, he wasn't a top-notch actor, but I see that he took a lead role in a film of Julian Symons' The Narrowing Circle - a book that I didn't know had been filmed. Sadly, no DVD appears to be available. I assume it sank without trace, but if anyone knows anything about it, do please let me know.

One actor I did recognise was William Hartnell, who played the Scotland Yard cop in his customary grumpy manner. A few years later, of course, he would achieve a kind of immortality by becoming the very first Doctor Who.