Staying overnight in Manchester with a friend in order to see an excellent staging of Let the Right One In, we decided to watch some TV before leaving the hotel for the theater. Finding a film on Talking Pictures was about to begin, we got ready to meet the lady.
View on the film:
Made at a time when capital punishment was still taking place in the UK, Rex Rienits holds this adaptation of Gerald Verner's novel with one hand on a compact murder mystery, and the other on a critical stance towards the death penalty, via a tightly coiled ticking time bomb fueling the need for Gale (played with a real charm by Dennis Price) to solve the case, before the wrongly convicted Margaret is killed.
Whilst proceedings are handled in a slightly dry, stage-bound manner, Rienits clearly uses Gale's wrong assumptions on the identity of the killer, to subtly give the audience a false perception in the dialogue of who the murderer is, who gets revealed by Rienits with a cup of tea.
Making his first theatrical feature film after working at the BBC for a number of years, director Wolf Rilla & Stolen Assignment (1955-also reviewed) cinematographer Walter J. Harvey boil up an elegant mystery atmosphere of overlapping dissolves and stylish close-ups on Gale, who frees Margaret from the shadow of the noose.
View on the film:
Made at a time when capital punishment was still taking place in the UK, Rex Rienits holds this adaptation of Gerald Verner's novel with one hand on a compact murder mystery, and the other on a critical stance towards the death penalty, via a tightly coiled ticking time bomb fueling the need for Gale (played with a real charm by Dennis Price) to solve the case, before the wrongly convicted Margaret is killed.
Whilst proceedings are handled in a slightly dry, stage-bound manner, Rienits clearly uses Gale's wrong assumptions on the identity of the killer, to subtly give the audience a false perception in the dialogue of who the murderer is, who gets revealed by Rienits with a cup of tea.
Making his first theatrical feature film after working at the BBC for a number of years, director Wolf Rilla & Stolen Assignment (1955-also reviewed) cinematographer Walter J. Harvey boil up an elegant mystery atmosphere of overlapping dissolves and stylish close-ups on Gale, who frees Margaret from the shadow of the noose.