Dear Murderer (1947)

Directed by Arthur Crabtree; produced by Betty E Box

Businessman Lee Warren (Eric Portman) returns to London, after eight months away, with a plan to kill the lover of his wife, Vivien (Greta Gynt). As the crime is being committed, however, the scheme goes awry – but not to Warren’s disadvantage. However, getting away with murder – or is it murders? – is only the beginning of the twists in this story.

A successful crime-story based on a successful play, Dear Murderer hides its stage origins well by numerous changes of scenes and plenty of movement among the actors. This is a credit to the director, but the laurels for an entertaining film go principally to the actors and the script, which reportedly stayed very close to the play’s.

Eric Portman may not be remembered as well as he should be today, but this interesting actor gave quality performances in many movies, a number from the production/direction team of ‘The Archers’ (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger). His superior elocution and haughty expressions often led him to portray arrogant Europeans, especially Germans, though he was, in fact, born in Yorkshire. Here, he walks a fine line: clearly a remorseless killer, he almost slips into the viewer’s sympathy. His motive, at least at the start, is understandable, and his resolve may not be as strong as he believes.

Gynt is also very good, but appreciation of her work in Dear Murderer may not be immediate. Indeed, her character is rather annoying initially; count the number of times she calls her husband and boyfriend ‘darling’. But there is more to Vivien Warren than a superficial desire for pleasure. Or is there?

The two younger secondary players, Maxwell Reed and Hazel Court, are weak links in the cast’s chain, and it’s not surprising that they eventually moved into filling a large number of guests spots on television series, though Reed had his own series for a few years. The pair portray their characters adequately, but no more.

Dennis Price has an unexpectedly small – though pivotal – part to play, while Jack Warner could fill his rôle as the investigating police officer in his sleep. (He played the very popular title cop in tv’s Dixon of Dock Green for 21 years, until he was 81!)

The story is clever and complex, without being complicated. Viewers won’t be able to guess where it will end up, and along the way will see a cat-and-mouse game with more than one mouse – and more than one cat. Not many plots feature a character trying to make a murder that was meant to look like suicide, look instead like a suicide that was murder.

The script provides the ingredients, as it were, for Portman and Gynt’s feast. The dialogue is sharp, even witty: at one point, the disillusioned Warren asks rhetorically why his mother-in-law always writes to him for permission to visit, answering himself, “Maybe she thinks I’m kinder-hearted than her daughter.”)

Dear Murderer is an excellent movie about how the best-laid plans don’t always work out, even when they do.

Cold in July (2014)

Directed by Jim Mickle; produced by Rene Bastian, Adam Folk, Linda Moran and Marie Savare

Richard Dane (Michael C Hall) has a good life with a loving wife, a growing son and decent job. This life is turned upside down when he shoots and kills a burglar. That horrendous but simple event becomes complicated after the police tell him that the burglar’s father, Ben Russel (Sam Shepard), has arrived in town. And yet, despite Russel being a career criminal, just out of prison, and implying a sinister fate for Richard, the young family man finds that this new twist to his once orderly existence may not be the biggest threat he’s facing.

An inventive entry in the ‘neo-noir’ genre, Cold in July could, with updates to content taken into account, easily fit into the original film noir category. One of the interesting aspects about the movie is how it changes its presentation: what seemingly is a straightforward story of a vengeful parent threatening a family becomes something else, and then, later, something else again. This might be a detriment with another script, but Cold in July moves seamlessly from one element to another, and continues to make sense doing it.

Hall does very well as an ordinary man – for once in a movie, he is not only already married but happily so – who owns a revolver but is so remorseful about using it that he feels he must attend his victim’s pathetic funeral. Shepard is a natural as the tough convict who has a surprising sense of justice. Don Johnson has fun playing the part of Shepard’s long-time friend, a private investigator / pig-farmer. Nick Damici, who co-wrote the screenplay with the director, plays the police detective in charge of the case. All are assets to the picture.

The writing is good, despite a few lapses (such as how Ben identifies the son he hasn’t seen in twenty years), but nothing that ruins the story. An entertaining feature is how it keeps the viewer guessing as to what will happen next, until the climax, which is both violent and exciting.

Mickle has most often directed and written in the horror genre. I can’t comment on any of those works but he manages crime and film-noir handily. There are bloody scenes but nothing exaggerated, and most of the tension comes from the relationships among the leading characters, and how they are depicted. At one hour and forty-nine minutes, little is added that shouldn’t have been, and the time is filled with what needs to be included.

Cold in July is an entertaining and satisfying crime-drama, one that those who enjoy such movies from the 1940s and ‘50s would like.

 

So Dark the Night (1946)

Directed by Joseph H Lewis; produced by Ted Richmond

Inspector Henri Cassin (Steven Geray) is the best detective in the Paris Police, but hasn’t had a holiday in eleven years. When at last his superior, Commissar Grande (Gregory Gay), persuades him to take time off, he goes to the little village of St Margot, hoping for peace and quiet. What he gets, as seems customary with detectives wanting peace and quiet, is a crime spree. When the local head of gendarmerie (Louis Mercier) asks for his help, Cassin cannot refuse him.

So Dark the Night seems to fit neatly in the category shared by probably hundreds of other low-budget mystery movies of the late 1930s and the 1940s. The protagonist is thrust into a situation in which he must use his professional skills to ascertain the truth; he meets a pretty woman who leads to romance; the killer is unmasked in a highly dramatic fashion. Yet this film has at least one element that allows it to stand out.

Steven Geray was much better known as a character actor than a lead player, which he seems to have played in other movie than this. He does adequately in the rôle, though he is hardly charismatic and barely stands out among the rest of the cast, perhaps illustrating the reason why he was much better known as a character actor.

The other players range in quality: Gay is quite convincing, more natural than Geray, while Micheline Cheirel, as the love-interest, is not really an asset to the film. (As well, the difference in her character’s age and Cassin’s is made much of in the script; since Geray was not yet forty at the time (he could perhaps have passed for a few years older), and Cheirel was almost thirty (and looked it), it would have been better to have cast either an older male lead or a younger female counterpart.) Almost all of the actors are European (French, Russian, German, Austrian, Belgian) in this American movie.

The direction is a little above average, though it should have been better, coming from the director of pictures such as My Name is Julia Ross (reviewed in this blog in December of 2019), Gun Crazy and The Big Combo. However, in the case of the first-named film, the script and the acting were what made it good; Lewis’s contribution was workman-like, as it is in So Dark the Night. He would do better.

The script is unexciting. Its Parisian characters are more interesting than its rural, who come off as stock; there is even a village hunchback (who dresses like Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.) The setting is France, maybe due to Geray’s continental accent. (While contemporary, the Second World War, with its German occupation of France, just ended, is not mentioned.)

It is, then, the story that elevates So Dark the Night. While the set-up seems standard, the mystery deepens as the movie progresses, and while the viewer may deduce the killer’s identity, he may not figure out what the outcome of the revelation will be. Cassin’s determination to bring the murderer to justice becomes something almost unique in mystery movies, at least of the period.

For this originality, the movie, which is largely forgotten, should be remembered.

The Third Secret (1964)

Directed by Charles Crichton; produced by Robert L Joseph

Eminent psychiatrist Leo Whitset (Peter Copley) is found in his office, shot in the head. The crime scene, the wound – to which he almost immediately succumbs – and his last words persuade police and the coroner that he committed suicide. But his young daughter, Cathy (Pamela Franklin), vehemently disputes the verdict and persuades one of her father’s past patients, television commentator Alex Stedman (Stephen Boyd), to look into the matter. There is no shortage of suspects: a mousey secretary (Diane Cilento), a defensive art-gallery owner (Richard Attenborough), a respected judge (Jack Hawkins), even Whitset’s colleague (Paul Rogers). But it’s possible the killer – if there is one – will strike again, and it may be as much for his own sake, as for Cathy’s, that Alex must find the truth.

It is its two leads, Boyd and Franklin, that make The Third Secret most watchable. Even so, the direction is very good; Chrichton previously directed the excellent Dead of Night and the equally excellent, but entirely different, The Lavender Hill Mob, and would direct only one other film, in 1965, until 1988’s A Fish Called Wanda. In between, he occupied himself with plenty of tv work and light-hearted documentaries for business managers. In The Third Secret, he does a good job of showing the isolation of people, each imprisoned in a way by their private lives or by tragedies. The climax is suitably unsettling.

The story is adequate, though the psychological aspects – this is a psychological thriller if there ever was one – might not convince trained professionals. For laymen, it has the jargon and what in science-fiction would be termed techno-babble to put the narrative over. It is satisfyingly mysterious in its treatment of the suspects, though whether viewers will guess the truth may depend on how well-trained they are by their reading of Agatha Christie books.

The script is faulty. Though it delivers what it needs to, the dialogue is an example of characters who prefer to answer questions with questions, or with metaphor; their conversations often head off obliquely to the topic. The script can’t be called pretentious, I think, but rather the phrase ‘too clever by half’ comes to mind.

Even so, aside from the dialogue, the writing creates credible characters. Cathy may at first seem impossibly precocious, yet this too is believable: the only child of a renowned doctor, clearly observant and intelligent, she suddenly demonstrates a delightful immaturity when showing Alex around her house. Alex’s character may be seen as inconsistent. I don’t agree with that; he is sometimes warm, sometimes cold, even cruel. Some people are like that, and Alex has his own demons with which to contend.

There is some difficulty due to editing. Patricia Neal was to have been included in the movie, as a suspect. This accounts for Cathy saying that there are “five” suspects at one point, when the movie clearly indicates four. Neal’s part was cut out but in some versions, the original scene with the spoken number remains. (Yet in others, it was dubbed over with “four”!) This has no important bearing on the movie, however.

But The Third Secret should be seen for the performances of the leads. They aren’t Oscar-winning acts, but simply skillfully crafted and convincingly delivered. Boyd is not well known these days, unfortunately, perhaps the result of an early death, preceded by a decade of mediocre parts. Nonetheless, he was a highly capable actor.

Franklin was a superb child-actress who, like many in that category, failed to translate her early talent into later years. In her case, drugs or alcohol were not to blame, just a series of bad career moves that ended in a list of tv guest-shots. It may be that her abilities, once beyond adolescence, were no longer considered by casting directors to be outstanding among adult performers. But it is in such early films as The Third Secret that her astonishingly fine acting may be seen and judged.

Regardless of their later work, Boyd and Franklin have great chemistry here, made plausible by the story: Cathy’s father has recently perished and Boyd’s daughter is revealed also to have died. But, despite the age difference, they come across almost as friends, rather than a surrogate family. According to an interview some years after the film, and after Boyd’s death, Franklin stated that the two had indeed been good friends on the set, which comes across in the movie. This is not surprising, as Boyd seems to have been one of Hollywood’s nice guys, staying on good terms even with his ex-wives and girlfriends.

While it has its flaws - an overly robust screenplay being the chief - The Third Secret is an entertaining and involving mystery-drama, better than average. (It is also the cinematic debut of Judi Dench, playing an art-gallery assistant.)