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 Young Poisoner's Handbook

The case of Graham Young is one of the most interesting murder-by-poisoning stories of the 20th century, and I’ve just watched the film based on Anthony Holden’s account of the case, The Young Poisoner’s Handbook.

Young discovered the efficiency of thallium as a means of committing murder whilst a teenager. He poisoned several people, including – fatally - his step-mother. Sent to Broadmoor, he was treated with some care and sympathy and ultimately released into the community – he was regarded as fully recovered. Thereafter, he found a job in a photographic supply business, but started to poison his colleagues. For weeks it was thought that the company had been afflicted by some mysterious ‘bug’, which resulted in two men suffering quite agonising deaths. It was only when Young started asking too many questions which revealed his obsessive fascination with poison that his background was checked and he was arrested. Surprisingly, he pleaded not guilty, but he went back to Broadmoor, where he died – allegedly of a heart attack, although there is some debate as to whether he was killed by fellow prisoners, or committed suicide; the film opts for the suicide version of events.

The film is a quirky comedy, and and attempts to mitigate accusations of tastelessness by distancing itself from the real-life story in a variety of ways. This makes for a better film, but a less insightful account of a very strange young man’s make-up. Hugh O’Conor plays Young, and the cast also includes such notable names as Roger Lloyd Pack and Anthony Sher (both do a good job, especially Sher as the gulled psychiatrist.)

Graham Young was one of the most remarkable poisoners in the history of crime. It is said that his hero was Dr Crippen. However, it’s worth remembering that if Crippen did murder his wife (which is open to question), he did it quickly, and the crime was a one-off. There is something remarkably cruel, to my mind, about the way Young allowed his victims to endure such horrific suffering. And it’s a level of cruelty that the film, although entertaining, does not begin to explain.