Psychological dramas are a cop-out until proved otherwise. This story is supposed to be about a mental patient accused of a murder he's not sure whether he committed. Yet this hardly drives the film at all. It shows up only in the odd close-up of the John Mills character (Ackland) frowning in self-doubt, as the evidence against him starts to build. The plot would have been stronger if Ackland had just been an ordinary Joe Blow with a clean bill of health.
What we are left with is only the mild satisfaction of peeping into a traditional Miss Marple guest-house, dominated by old widows playing bridge, tempered by one female who is sharply different - a striking case of beauty in distress, in the form of Kay Walsh as Molly, whose private life is getting too busy for her own good. And Joan Greenwood represents the shining reward that Ackland might enjoy if he ever gets out of this nightmare alive.
We can't reveal any more here. But most of the characters generally disappoint by failing to interact. One of them is just reduced to repeating "Can we have more coal?" (referencing rationing and the freezing winter of 1947 when the film was made), while Joyce Carey looks far too spinsterish to be 'Mrs' anyone. But almost any of them look more likely than Molly to be the local horoscope fiend. This brisk, sharp, canny operator really does not carry conviction as the mystic who befriends Ackland by flattering him on the grounds of his birth-sign, from which we get the film's title.
A few other nostalgic echoes, especially how the self-perceived servant class (cab-drivers, stationmasters, even some police) instinctively rush to obey a short, sharp word of command delivered in an establishment voice. But it must be said that scriptwriter Eric Ambler has done far better work than this as a novelist, which is how I classify him to the exclusion of anything else.
What we are left with is only the mild satisfaction of peeping into a traditional Miss Marple guest-house, dominated by old widows playing bridge, tempered by one female who is sharply different - a striking case of beauty in distress, in the form of Kay Walsh as Molly, whose private life is getting too busy for her own good. And Joan Greenwood represents the shining reward that Ackland might enjoy if he ever gets out of this nightmare alive.
We can't reveal any more here. But most of the characters generally disappoint by failing to interact. One of them is just reduced to repeating "Can we have more coal?" (referencing rationing and the freezing winter of 1947 when the film was made), while Joyce Carey looks far too spinsterish to be 'Mrs' anyone. But almost any of them look more likely than Molly to be the local horoscope fiend. This brisk, sharp, canny operator really does not carry conviction as the mystic who befriends Ackland by flattering him on the grounds of his birth-sign, from which we get the film's title.
A few other nostalgic echoes, especially how the self-perceived servant class (cab-drivers, stationmasters, even some police) instinctively rush to obey a short, sharp word of command delivered in an establishment voice. But it must be said that scriptwriter Eric Ambler has done far better work than this as a novelist, which is how I classify him to the exclusion of anything else.