I found this film so mesmerizing that when it ended, I put it on again and watched it a second time. There are complaints galore voiced by reviewers here, and almost without exception I don't understand them. They say the film is overacted. That it is incoherent. That the musical score is terrible. That the police should have easily identified the killer. And on we go. I admit to being a performance-driven viewer, and except for, of all things, a Walter Huston-Claudette Colbert film from 1929, I don't think I've seen a new (to me) movie in at least a year (and I sometimes watch three or four a night) that was as excitingly acted as was this one. This is not a spoiler, but I will list it as such, just in case, as seems to be the case here, some people didn't watch the opening of the film. It starts with the murder - somewhat accidental - of a beautiful girl by an enraged Leo McKern. There, everybody knows this from the first 30 seconds (even before the credits appear), so you should, too. Right from that scene, and in every other one in which he appears, McKern is shown to be something of a nut job. He flies off the handle at anybody and everybody with what may be the loudest voice in the British Theater. His wife is afraid of him, his son seems to be terrified of him, and at all times he acts like someone who could go off the deep end in about 15 seconds. This is the character as written! Leo McKern does not OVERACT it. When someone asks why the police didn't cotton on to him as the potential murderer, the answer is simple: he has an alibi for the time of the killing, and being the wealthy head of a large and successful company, it is obvious that he can keep his terrible temper under control when in professional or non-family settings. Besides which, the victim's boyfriend got drunk with her, and then when found the next morning, could not recall the prior night's events, and never claims absolute innocence because he's not certain he didn't kill her. Enter his father, as magnificently played by Michael Redgrave. With all the great roles he played on screen from THE LADY VANISHES on to DEAD OF NIGHT and THE BROWNING VERSION, I think this is the best acting job of his screen career. He is a severe alcoholic who has just spent two years in a Canadian sanitarium, divorced by his doctors from just about any contact with the outside world, even to the confiscation of newspapers and magazines, and upon release he finds that his son is about to be executed for murder. Arriving in London by plane, he looks right from the start like an extremely troubled and vulnerable man who may, even in the absence of his son's problems, be exerting only a tenuous hold on his sanity and emotions. Redgrave goes through the entire film in the most incredibly complex gradations of the character we first see, and how he was able to keep those gradations going so well, scene to scene, over what must have been at least a few weeks of filming is damn near awe-inspiring. Think of his ventriloquist character in DEAD OF NIGHT, take the insanity out and put paranoia, fear, guilt and a sense of impending doom in its place, and that is the person Redgrave plays so perfectly through every second of the entire film. It is a great performance, as good or better than anything else he did on the screen. Also to be mentioned here is an actor I did not previously know, Paul Daneman, as McKern's son. A handsome young man, Daneman looks uncomfortable, frightened, squeamish, and near suicidal throughout a good portion of the film, and as you get to know Dad, you understand why, but it is perhaps the only one of the lead performances that might be termed 'underacted'. I will see more of his work. And Ann Todd is excellent, and very beautiful (more so than in many earlier films), at, for the 1950s, the relatively late age of 48. The three other ladies in the film, Lois Maxwell (in an unusual role for her as a femme fatale), Renee Houston (magnificently coarse and blowsy as Lois's mother) and, if you can believe it, Joan Plowright as a cheapish chorus girl are excellent. In any large cast that incudes Peter Cushing, and where Cushing is rather pushed into the shade by the other actors, you know you are getting a textbook lesson in the art of acting, even if a lot of it is over-the-top. But there's good over-the-top (think John Barrymore) and not so good over-the-top (think Bela Lugosi, at least on occasion), and while it is really Redgrave who holds the film together (except when he takes his trench coat off to try to wave down a racing car driven by McKern, and then at the very end for a different reason, he is dressed in that trench coat, indoors and outdoors, for the entire film, as the time he has to save his son's life is so compressed that he never seems to spend more than a few minutes in any one place), over-the-top honors belong to Mr. McKern every step of the way. And given that the story is based on an Emlyn Williams play, they must have opened it up considerably for the film, as it seems to take place all over London, instead of in one or two stage settings. I think the copy I've seen is the cut one mentioned elsewhere, as there are a couple of scenes that are rather sprung upon the viewer with no real lead-up - how did McKern end up in that pub drinking and lamenting the loneliness of his life with Redgrave (who would seem to be, in comparison, the loneliest man on the planet)? how was it decided that McKern would drive Redgrave anywhere at all? how did Ann Todd go from having her hair piled on high to having it down on her shoulders if a good slap from McKern did not effect the change? But we see none of this. Doesn't matter, though, since I'm not recommending this as one of the great mysteries (we know who did it, but how will everybody else find out?), or noirs, or even as containing the most sensible of cast characterizations. I'm simply recommending it for the acting and the pure visceral excitement that can be garnered from watching great British actors acting greatly, and especially under the masterful direction of Joseph Losey.
(And the finale is a killer - in more ways than one!)
