A businessman called Richard Hammond (John Gregson) is visited by his wife Christiane (Mia Zetterling) at his factory who asks for a divorce. That same day Hammond is blinded as a result of an accident in his workshop and his wife backs down on her decision vowing to take care of him. Richard's layabout brother Max (John Ireland) appears asking for money and his business partner David Merton (Michael Denison) seems keen to take over the day to day running of the business completely. Prior to the accident, Merton was worried because his partner was insistent on his company funding the Apollo bulb project entirely by themselves despite warnings from the bank and offers from a rival firm to put financial backing into it. It risked bankrupting them completely. When the Hammonds go to their Cornish summer house for a holiday, they are joined by David and Max and Richard starts to suspect that his wife and business partner are plotting to drive him insane before murdering him. However, his blindness means that he is very vulnerable and it is even harder for him to prove his suspicions against them...
A long missed British psychological thriller with a plot that promises to be a real nail biter, but somehow fails to connect with our nerves throughout the first half of the picture. The concept of a vulnerable blind man being tricked into believing that he is losing his mind is a good one and the screenplay by Ephraim Kogan and John Tully from a novel by Pierre Boileau (the guy who wrote the novel upon which Hitchcock's Vertigo was based) allows for a number of twists and turns that really should pile on the suspense. For example, Gregson's attempts to find his way around what he believes to be his holiday home in Cornwall - in reality, Christiane and David have transported him to a similar property in France in order to get him away from any contact with anybody he knows and making it easier to murder him without suspicion - and discovering that things are not in their proper places such as wall sockets not being in the place they should be when he goes to plug in his electric razor and the peach trees he once planted in the gardens are not in the place he remembers them. Then, later, he is lead to believe that his brother has died and he gets his chauffeur to drive him to the cemetery so that he can visit the grave and finds his own name carved on the headstone. Yet, director David Eady is unable to get a performance from his leading man that conveys the sense of paranoia, self doubt and helplessness of his character for it to ignite and the build up is sadly rather flat and lifeless.
However, the film does pick up speed and resource in an exciting last reel when Gregson escapes from the house and runs helplessly through the woods at night. The suspense increases when he comes to a railroad crossing and the barriers come down trapping him and he only narrowly avoids being run over by a train. Ken Hodges' b/w camera-work works wonders in these scenes. He awakes at a hospital where he finds that the doctor and nurse attending to him are French and they do not believe his story about Christiane and David's elaborate plot to drive him out of his mind before killing him so that they can get control of his money believing him to be mad. They send for his wife to come and take him home despite his protestations and he is immediately put back into dire peril. The climax, it has to be said, carries a genuine charge of fear and there is little sense of relief either. So, despite a slow start, Faces In The Dark is nonetheless well worth the watch.
A long missed British psychological thriller with a plot that promises to be a real nail biter, but somehow fails to connect with our nerves throughout the first half of the picture. The concept of a vulnerable blind man being tricked into believing that he is losing his mind is a good one and the screenplay by Ephraim Kogan and John Tully from a novel by Pierre Boileau (the guy who wrote the novel upon which Hitchcock's Vertigo was based) allows for a number of twists and turns that really should pile on the suspense. For example, Gregson's attempts to find his way around what he believes to be his holiday home in Cornwall - in reality, Christiane and David have transported him to a similar property in France in order to get him away from any contact with anybody he knows and making it easier to murder him without suspicion - and discovering that things are not in their proper places such as wall sockets not being in the place they should be when he goes to plug in his electric razor and the peach trees he once planted in the gardens are not in the place he remembers them. Then, later, he is lead to believe that his brother has died and he gets his chauffeur to drive him to the cemetery so that he can visit the grave and finds his own name carved on the headstone. Yet, director David Eady is unable to get a performance from his leading man that conveys the sense of paranoia, self doubt and helplessness of his character for it to ignite and the build up is sadly rather flat and lifeless.
However, the film does pick up speed and resource in an exciting last reel when Gregson escapes from the house and runs helplessly through the woods at night. The suspense increases when he comes to a railroad crossing and the barriers come down trapping him and he only narrowly avoids being run over by a train. Ken Hodges' b/w camera-work works wonders in these scenes. He awakes at a hospital where he finds that the doctor and nurse attending to him are French and they do not believe his story about Christiane and David's elaborate plot to drive him out of his mind before killing him so that they can get control of his money believing him to be mad. They send for his wife to come and take him home despite his protestations and he is immediately put back into dire peril. The climax, it has to be said, carries a genuine charge of fear and there is little sense of relief either. So, despite a slow start, Faces In The Dark is nonetheless well worth the watch.