Stranger in Town is a black and white movie adapted from a novel by Frank Chittenden called The Uninvited. I know very little about Chittenden, but he appears to have produced five novels, generally as by F.A. Chittenden. This one appears to have been his last effort, which is surprising, as it was adapted for radio even before being filmed - a successful note to bow out on, if one assumes he gave up writing crime fiction afterwards.
The director was George Pollock, today remembered by me as the director of Murder Most Foul, the movie that introduced me to Agatha Christie. He was responsible for four Miss Marple films starring Margaret Rutherford, and also for the 1965 film Ten Little Indians, a somewhat regrettable version of Christie's finest novel. He wasn't Hitchcock, that's for sure, but he was a competent entertainer.
In this story, a moody composer is murdered, and his former girlfriend (Ann Paige) mourns him. The death is put down as suicide, but once John Madison (played by Alex Nicol) turns up and starts poking his nose in, the villagers become increasingly defensive. Surely it wasn't a case of murder? Well, we can predict the answer long before a second death occurs.
The story is so-so, and the real joy of this film lies in the supporting cast, which features actors who became more successful than the lead actors (whose performances are not terribly gripping). So we have Willoughby Goddard, so wonderful in the William Tell series a couple of years after this film came out, Harry Towb, Charles Lloyd Pack, and the marvellous Arthur Lowe all in minor parts. Not a bad film, and I'd be interested to learn more about Chittenden.
Showing posts with label Charles Lloyd Pack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charles Lloyd Pack. Show all posts
Wednesday, 26 April 2017
Wednesday, 14 January 2015
Noose for a Lady - film/DVD review
Noose for a Lady is a 1953 whodunit film which seemed to have been well and truly forgotten until its recent release in DVD form. Having just watched it, I must say I'm glad it's been resurrected, because it presents a highly traditional whodunit in the space of just over 70 minutes and provides decent entertainment from start to finish. The director, Wolf Rilla, by the way, later became renowned for The Village of the Damned, based on John Wyndham's classic sci-fi novel The Midwich Cuckoos.
The set-up is very familiar. A woman has been convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to death. An appeal fails, and her fate seems to be sealed by the time a cousin (Dennis Price, that great post-war smoothie) returns from Uganda and decides she is innocent, and must be saved. So we have a clock-race element coupled with a hunt for a killer among the genteel family and social circle of the dead man.
Suspicion shifts pleasingly from one suspect to another. Is the killer the suave doctor (Ronald Howard) or the dodgy collector of knick-knacks (Charles Lloyd Pack, father of Roger Lloyd Pack, and grandfather of Emily Lloyd)? Or perhaps a retired soldier with a discreditable past, or the local busy-body, or the pretty girl Price's character fancies? Or...well, you get the picture.
The film is based on a novel by Gerald Verner, which in turn appears to have been based on a radio serial - this would explain why it is very dialogue-heavy. I've never read anything by Verner, but he was certainly prolific, with well over one hundred novels to his credit. He also adapted Agatha Christie's Towards Zero for the stage. It seems that Edgar Wallace was a major influence on him, but this story is more in the Christie vein. It's a competently made, unpretentious film, and like so many hitherto neglected books and films, it's now enjoying a new lease of life as it becomes, happily, cheaper and easier to make such work available to a new generation of fans at modest cost.
The set-up is very familiar. A woman has been convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to death. An appeal fails, and her fate seems to be sealed by the time a cousin (Dennis Price, that great post-war smoothie) returns from Uganda and decides she is innocent, and must be saved. So we have a clock-race element coupled with a hunt for a killer among the genteel family and social circle of the dead man.
Suspicion shifts pleasingly from one suspect to another. Is the killer the suave doctor (Ronald Howard) or the dodgy collector of knick-knacks (Charles Lloyd Pack, father of Roger Lloyd Pack, and grandfather of Emily Lloyd)? Or perhaps a retired soldier with a discreditable past, or the local busy-body, or the pretty girl Price's character fancies? Or...well, you get the picture.
The film is based on a novel by Gerald Verner, which in turn appears to have been based on a radio serial - this would explain why it is very dialogue-heavy. I've never read anything by Verner, but he was certainly prolific, with well over one hundred novels to his credit. He also adapted Agatha Christie's Towards Zero for the stage. It seems that Edgar Wallace was a major influence on him, but this story is more in the Christie vein. It's a competently made, unpretentious film, and like so many hitherto neglected books and films, it's now enjoying a new lease of life as it becomes, happily, cheaper and easier to make such work available to a new generation of fans at modest cost.
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