The Dark Man - 1951 film review

The Dark Man is an enjoyable, lightweight British thriller written and directed by Jeffrey Dell, whose first crime screenplay was an adaptation of C.S. Forester's classic chiller, Payment Deferred, in which Charles Laughton starred. The producer was Julian Wintle, famed for his work on The Avengers in the Sixties. This movie has a good cast, with the likes of Barbara Murray, William Hartnell, and the ubiquitous Sam Kydd in minor roles. The mysterious villain who gives the film its title is Maxwell Reed, who was apparently the first husband of Joan Collins.

Reed's character takes a taxi to a lonely house where he seeks to rob a petty criminal. When the criminal retaliates, he is murdered. And then the taxi driver is murdered, for good measure. The Dark Man is evidently a psychopath, although we never get to find out much about him. But we fear for Molly Lester (Natasha Perry) when, cycling past the scene of the crime, she catches sight of him.

This fleeting identification drives the plot, since the dark man becomes determined to eliminate Molly as a witness. Frankly, I'd have thought he'd have been much better off making a run for it. But no, he hangs around the coastal resort where Molly is working as an actress, now under the protection of Scotland Yard's DI Jack Viner (Edward Underdown). Molly is attractive and charismatic, if foolhardy, so we care about her fate; she falls in love with Viner, who is very much of the stiff upper lip school. I felt, however, underwhelmed by Underdown's performance.

The coastal setting is in many ways the star turn of The Dark Man. It's rather bleak, with a military firing range, derelict castle, and old lighthouse, but highly atmospheric. I don't know south east England well enough to recognise the location, but I thought it very well chosen.

Radio Cab Murder - 1954 film review

Radio Cab Murder is a rather likeable 1954 British B-movie, typical of its era, and short enough not to grow tedious. The aim was to give an impression of authenticity and topicality, rather like the Scotland Yard TV series of the same vintage. Of course, the drawback of such an approach is that, years later, the material seems dated. But if it's a period piece, it's an entertaining one.

Jimmy Hanley is a driver for Radio Cabs who witnesses a robbery and gives chase to the villains before they escape him. He becomes something of a hero, but he's also a man with a past. After leaving the army, he had become a safecracker, and has served time in prison for his crimes. But now he's going straight, with a girlfriend at Radio Cabs HQ.

His new life becomes increasingly dramatic when the police conclude that a gang of robbers are planning to recruit him to help with their next job. He agrees to help trap the crooks, and his supposed dismissal from Radio Cabs is contrived. Sure enough, the bad guys, led by the ubiquitous Sam Kydd, enlist his aid for their proposed robbery. But the information they give him is phoney, and when he relays it to the police, they are duly led astray.

The bank robbery duly takes place, and I must say I thought the bad guys were remarkably cavalier about leaving their fingerprints all over the scene of the crime. Evidently there are limits to attempts at authenticity. Sam Kydd does his usual sound job, and there's a small part for Frank Thornton, who would later become famous as Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served? All in all, a good piece of light entertainment, still very watchable.

Final Appointment - 1954 film review

Final Appointment is a good example of the Fifties black and white crime movie. Short and snappy and appealing, with a bonus in the appearance of a future star. This is a story about a series of killings that are clearly connected. A journalist (played by John Bentley) investigates, in collaboration with a colleague who fancies him (Eleanor Summerfiled) and an affable if sceptical cop (Liam Redmond).

The film begins with Bentley waiting for an appointment with a snooty solicitor (Hubert Gregg). He's told brusquely that you can't walk in off the street and demand an appointment with the senior partner. Nowadays, of course, you'd have to spend ages proving your identity so that there could be full compliance with anti-money laundering legislation. No such bureaucracy sixty years back...

Bentley has discovered that three men have been killed on the same date in each of the past three years. And that the solicitor is receiving threatening letters. Bizarrely, the solicitor doesn't seem in the least bit bothered. There's not a strong plot reason for this remarkable lack of legal caution. Soon the connecting link between the deaths becomes clear. I felt this revelation might have been held back a bit to increase the mystery. I was also not quite convinced that the motive was strong enough to justify such havoc. Anyway, for most of the film, the focus is on identifying the killer, and trying to avert the murder of the irritating solicitor..

The cast is a good one, and includes that versatile actor Sam Kydd. But I was particularly pleased to spot Arthur Lowe working in the solicitors' office. Yes, Captain Mainwaring himself, looking exactly the same as he did many years later. It's a small part, though; he was a minor figure in those days. Overall, it's a film well worth watching, directed by Terence Fisher with a screenplay by Kenneth Hayles. The source was a play by Sidney Nelson and Maurice Harrison called Death Keeps a Date.

Death Goes to School - 1953 film review

I was intrigued to find Death Goes to School , a 1953 black and white movie, on the Talking Pictures schedule recently. Public schools were a rather popular setting for traditional mysteries. Nicholas Blake, R.C. Woodthorpe, Christopher Bush, Gladys Mitchell and others wrote good examples, using the "closed society" of the English public school to provide a conveniently limited pool of suspects. But I'd never heard before of this film, or the novel on which it was based, Death in Seven Hours by Stratford Davis.

I discovered that Stratford Davis was a pen-name for Maisie Sharman, who also co-wrote the screenplay with the film's director, Stephen Clarkson. I know little about Sharman, but it seems she enjoyed a remarkably lengthy, if not exactly prolific, career as a screenwriter. According to that useful source IMDB, her first credit was a 1938 film called Night Journey, and her last was a 1973 TV mystery, written as Miriam Sharman. If anyone reading this blog is familiar with her work, I'd like to know more.

Death Goes to School is an unpretentious mystery, but competent and still watchable. It benefits from the fact that three key roles went to actors of genuine quality. Barbara Murray plays the likeable young schoolteacher whose scarf is used to strangle a nasty colleague. Gordon Jackson plays the rather macho police inspector and the ever-reliable Sam Kydd is his sidekick. They get the best out of their parts. There's quite a nice joke when Barbara Murray gives as her alibi the fact that she was reading a thriller called...Death in Seven Hours.

The plot is competent rather than dazzling. Various people at the school have a motive, as the thinly characterised victim really was very unpleasant. Someone outside the school then comes into the frame. I felt that the motive for the murder wasn't terribly convincing, but despite this weakness, the film held my attention. As with so many of those Fifties B-movies, it's decent light entertainment.

No Trace - aka Murder by the Book - 1950 film review

No Trace, also known as Murder by the Book, is a crime film from 1950 which benefits from a cast with strength in depth. It's the story of a crime novelist who finds himself driven by sheer desperation to commit murder. Ah, a familiar feeling, you may say. Perhaps I'll refrain from comment as to the plausibility of the premise!

The novelist, Robert Southley, is very successful, and has a devoted and very attractive secretary (Dinah Sheridan) as well as chums in the police force - an inspector played by John Laurie, later of Dad's Army fame, and a sergeant who also fancies the secretary, who is played by Barry Morse, later the remorseless cop who pursued Richard Kimble for so long in the seemingly never-ending TV series The Fugitive.

Southley is played by Hugh Sinclair, and this is one of those stories where a chap who is on the straight and narrow is suddenly confronted by someone from his less salubrious past who is intent on blackmail. We're asked to believe that the upright Southley was once a member of a gang that went around the US burgling places. I did find it difficult to suspend my belief here, a problem exacerbated by the fact that Sinclair is really the weakest link in the whole cast. I really wasn't sure what the secretary saw in him.

The story unfolds rather nicely - it's one of those where we see a killer execute a clever plan, and the question is whether he'll get away with it or be tripped up by smart detective work. Along the way, there are roles for Dora Bryan and the ubiquitous Sam Kydd. All in all it's a very watchable film, although some fuzziness about Southley's characterisation means that it isn't quite as gripping as it might have been.



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Portrait of Alison - film review

Portrait of Alison is a 1956 film based on Francis Durbridge's tv serial of the previous year. In the US, the film was known as Postmark for Danger. The story was written at a time when Durbridge was at the peak of his powers, and of his fame, and the plot includes a host of the devices that one associates with Durbridge - above all, the seemingly commonplace, yet at the same time inexplicable and bizarre item that seems to connect mysterious and murderous events. In this case, the item is a postcard of a bottle of Chianti, in the hand of a woman.

A car crashes in Italy with fatal consequences. An artist working in London, Tim Forrester (Robert Beatty) is told that his brother was at the wheel, and a young woman passenger was killed with him. The bodies are so badly burned as to be unrecognisable, and you don't need to be Paul Temple (who doesn't actually feature in this story) to suspect that all may not be as it seems.

The plot thickens rapidly as Tim is asked by the father of the dead girl, Alison Ford, to paint a portrait of her from a photograph. The photo vanishes, as does Alison's dress, which the father had given to Tim, while the portrait is defaced. Tim discovers all this when he comes home one day - to find the body of his regular model, who happens to be wearing Alison's dress. What can it all mean?

The route to the solution is as twisty as usual with Durbridge. Portrait of Alison is typical of his best work, with a gripping (if unlikely) plot and limited emphasis on characterisation and setting. The performances of the lead actors are rather wooden, I'm afraid, but there is ample compensation in the supporting cast, which is full of notable British character actors of the Fifties and Sixties - the likes of Geoffrey Keen, Raymond Francis, Sam Kydd, Terence Alexander (later renowned as Charlie Hungerford in Bergerac), William Lucas and Allan Cuthbertson (once ubiquitous on the TV screen, and now perhaps best remembered for an episode of Fawlty Towers). Good light entertainment.