Mr Denning Drives North - 1951 film review

It's a long time since I read Alec Coppel's novel Mr Denning Drives North, but I remembered it as a decent suspense story, and this prompted me to watch the film version, made in 1951, a couple of years after the book appeared. Coppel was a capable writer, with a particular gift for dialogue and building tension. He was one of the writers of Vertigo, one of the finest of all crime films - some would say the finest.

The protagonist is played by John Mills, who as ever is a thoroughly decent Englishman. He's well off, happily married, and has an attractive daughter. But at the start of the film, he's plagued by nightmares, and it appears that he has a guilty conscience. It's soon clear that he's implicated in a murder case, and before long he confesses the truth to his wife, played by Phyllis Calvert.

His daughter had fallen for a loathsome chap, played by Herbert Lom, and Denning wanted to buy off the blackguard. He persuades him to write a letter breaking off the relationship, on payment of £500, but when he feels that his daughter's honour is insulted, he hits the chap, who falls on the hearth and dies. Manslaughter rather than murder, I'd have thought, but our hero makes the first of several extremely foolish decisions when he decides to cover up the crime.

He doesn't actually drive all that far north to dispose of the corpse; the southern reaches of the Home Counties, by the look of things. But the plot thickens when the body disappears. Denning continues to behave so foolishly that I found it rather difficult to root for him, but I did admire the way in which Coppel piled on the complications. It's a crafty story, and the film benefits from a good cast, with Wilfred Hyde White especially entertaining as a mortuary attendant. Bernard Lee plays a good natured cop, and Sam Wanamaker is a young American patents lawyer who falls for Denning's daughter and unwittingly does his utmost to bring Denning's crime to the attention of the authorities. It's pretty good entertainment.

Web of Evidence - 1959 film review

Web of Evidence is the American title of a 1959 British film which in this country was called Beyond This Place. The screenplay was based on a novel by A.J. Cronin, also called Beyond This Place. Cronin isn't someone I associate with crime writing, and I guess the novel may be a bit more of a mainstream book than a thriller. But he was a good novelist - and the creator of Dr Finlay's Casebook - and I imagine it's worth reading.

The film is one of those which grafts American actors on to a British story solely for commercial reasons. Fortunately, in this case the actors are Van Johnson and Vera Miles, both of whom were very capable performers. Oddly enough, the setting is Liverpool, and I was fascinated to see shots of the city as it was in the late Fifties - a much grimmer place than it is today, for sure.

Johnson plays Paul Mathry, who docks at Liverpool for a few days in the hope of tracing his father, whom he lost touch with at the start of the war, when his mother took him away to the United States. He is shocked to find that his father (played by Bernard Lee, just before he became "M" in the James Bond films) was convicted of murder, and only escaped the gallows with the help of a campaigner (Emlyn Williams).

Johnson decides Dad was innocent, and sets out to prove it. But he faces obstruction from the authorities, who don't want the old case to be re-opened. Vera Miles, a local librarian, helps Johnson in his quest, and naturally they fall for each other. But she too has a secret in her past. I wasn't qutie convinced by some of the legal aspects of the plot, but that didn't matter too much. The quality of the acting (the likes of Leo McKern, Geoffrey Keen and Rosalie Crutchley also appear) coupled with a solid story make this a very watchable film.

Complicity - film review

Complicity is a film made as long ago as 2000; it didn't make many waves at the time of its release, despite the fact that it was based on a book by Iain Banks, but it still seems fresh and refreshingly different. In fact, it's only the snippets of technology - clunky mobile phones and computers in particular -that give the film's age away.

Cameron Colley is a young Scottish journalist whose radical political views tend to infuse everything he writes, to the detriment of his career. Cameron is played by Jonny Lee Miller - who is, I learned, the grandson of Bernard Lee, who played M in the early Bond movies - and he has a long-running affair with Yvonne, the wife of a friend; she's played by Keeley Hawes, whose performance is, as usual, compelling.

Cameron receives a series of mysterious phone tip-offs from a source who is disguising his voice. His attention is drawn to a series of gruesome deaths. There seems to be some form of link between the deaths and arms sales to Iraq, but before long, the police become involved, and Cameron himself becomes the prime suspect of the dogged detective. The cop is played by Brian Cox, and other notable cast members include Bill Paterson and Alex Norton, who was Burke in the later series of Taggart.

Never mind complicity, the storyline is complicated, and it's not always easy to understand what is going on. As the plot continues to thicken, it becomes apparent that that the murders may have some personal connection to Cameron, and his erratic past. The soundtrack is pretty good, and there is some excellent photography of superb Scottish scenery. Not the most plausible story, to be honest, but a very watchable movie. I'm surprised it's not better known.

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The Terror by Edgar Wallace

I've very much enjoyed reading the Detective Story Club reprints that are being so attractively republished by Harper Collins. They occupy a slightly different part of the market than the British Library Crime Classics series, covering a longer time frame and including thrillers as well as whodunits. The books are keenly priced hardbacks with dust jackets that reproduce the original cover artwork. As you can see from the above image, The Terror is nothing if not dramatic!

The Terror was written by Edgar Wallace and is the second book in this series to which I've provided an introduction; the first was that very intriguing Victorian novel Called Back, by Hugh Conway. This is a very different kind of story, but it's packed with twisty action; reading it,you can see that Wallace had the storytelling skills of a mega-seller.

The Terror headed the list of six books which got the Detective Story Club off to a flying start, and was the only one of the half-dozen that was not a reprint. Wallace got the idea while on holiday in France in 1926, and turned it into a stage play before writing the novel. It was quickly filmed, and then remade with Alastair Sim and Bernard Lee in lead roles.

This edition also includes, as a bonus, Wallace's story White Face, which was also based on a stage play. Again, it was also filmed, though the film is now considered 'lost', and again it supplies lively escapist entertainment. The titles included in this series are highly diverse, ranging from the two books I've introduced to The Ponson Case by Freeman Wills Crotts and the highly enjoyable first appearance of Colonel Anthony Gethryn, The Rasp. And quite apart from their lively contents, these books do look lovely on the shelf!