The Broken Horseshoe - 1953 film review

The Broken Horseshoe is a thriller based on a serial by Francis Durbridge. The director, Martyn C.Webster, had a long association with Durbridge from the Thirties onwards, and was a key influence on Durbridge's radio career, while Peter Coke, who plays the police inspector in this movie, was one of radio's best Paul Temples.

But this isn't a Paul Temple story. It's a stand-alone mystery, and it boasts some of the classic Durbridge hallmarks, although it''s not as consistently compelling as some of his later serials, in which his mastery of the cliff-hanger was so evident. The premise is a good one - a successful doctor operates on a man badly hurt in  a hit and run accident, and become infatuated with a mysterious woman who has some inexplicable connection with the patient.

The mystery woman (played by Elizabeth Sellars) persuades the naive doctor (Robert Beatty) to say nothing to the police after she turns up at the block of flats where the doctor has just found his former patient murdered. Obligingly, he discloses to her that the dead man had given him an envelope addressed to an unknown woman, and that inside it he has found only a railway ticket. In the flat where the body was found, someone has daubed on a mirror a picture of a broken horseshoe.

The doctor's persistent foolishness is rather irritating, and tends to weaken the grip of the story. The plot hinges, as so often with Durbridge, on the antics of a criminal gang, and I didn't feel that the later development of the story fulfilled the promise of the set-up..There is a reasonable plot twist, but the acting isn't quite strong enough to allow us to overlook the shortcomings. Not bad, but by no means the best of Durbridge.

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.