on 1/17/2025, 9:26 am
Solid accounting of one of the more intense Brit-noirs of the immediate post-WWII time frame, featured as one of the "English language films" in last year's Noir City.
You can watch it here:
IMDB reviewer Doug Doepke was suitably impressed:
A British noir as good as the definitive ones being turned out in the States by such consensus masters as Mann, Dassin, and Lewis, to name three. And what about that great ending that still leaves me flabbergasted. Three cheers for a British cinema that apparently was able to operate without the albatross of a Production Code and still not wreck the nation's moral fiber. Needless to say, those final few minutes would never have been allowed Stateside where the scales of justice always triumphed, no matter how the world really works.
Then too, consider the household Howard stumbles into by accident, where the zoned out housewife is only too eager to perforate her boozy hubby. One look at that demented visage and she's a lot scarier than any of the professionals. No wonder Howard flees back to the safety of London's underworld. This may also be the cheapest electricity bill on record since the brightest sound-stage bulb checks in at about 60 watts (they don't call it "noir" for nothing(. And keep an ear cocked for some of the snappiest dialogue this side of Dashiell Hammett, especially from that old crone Aggie, who, I shudder to think, might actually be somebody's grandmother.
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