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.