Who is Margaret? What happened to her? She just vanished. That's the mystery here, and for all accounts, of all who knew her, she is irrevocably lost and can't be found ever again. She vanished in some fire before the war (13 years ago) with several casualties in some work shop for exclusive technical instruments outside London somewhere, when beautiful Bernadette O'Farrell happens to meet Cesar Romero (as a journalist on a brief visit from America) at a bar where he is mixing an explosive cocktail, whch actually explodes like a bomb. That's just one of a number of comic curiosities in this film, which turn up every now and then. There is a film studio also with a great famous film producer with a sense of humour constantly laughing, but eventually he stops that when he needs a few more drinks (Geoffrey Keen, for once not a police inspector). The grand finale is in that film studio, somewhat reminding of other similar finales in great thrillers, like for instance "The Intimate Stranger" with Richard Baseheart and "Charade" with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, but this was ten years before that. The problem with Bernadette O'Farrell is that her brother has just been killed in a car accident (as someone drove him over in the fog), and she knows it was not an accident, while she has no evidence. Cesar Romero gets as interested in this as in her, and they start examing and digging up graveyards, figuratively speaking, and eventually locate a murder committed 13 years ago. There are some scenes in an asylum where an ingenious inventor is kept locked up, the asylum telling all who ask for him that he is dead, which Cesar Romero eventually finds out he isn't. There are some intriguing reminiscences here of James Hilton and his "Random Harvest", to some degree probably inspired by that ace of a story, and so the intrigues go rolling on. It's a great thriller on a small scale and quite exciting and captivating enough to keep your interest up all the way. Finally the mystery of Margaret is resolved, as she proves to be the lady in the fog.
Review of Scotland Yard Inspector
