User Reviews

Sometimes a movie can have great characterizations and dialog and be short on plot or reality. That is the case in this fast talking British comedy caper film that is as entertaining as it is frustrating. Because of the lightning speed, some of the British dialects are often difficult to understand, but once you get into the film, it seems to settle down a bit. It involves the chase of bank robbers from America who are after the person who ended up with the stolen loot and how eventually the law gets involved. Clifford Evans and Patricia Roc star, along with David Farrar, as the "good guys" (although Evans is somewhat amoral), with Robert Beatty and Eric Claverling as the robbers on the chase and on the run. It's a bit of a cat and mouse where often they switch who is the hunted. Ann Firth provides some sex appeal as Evan's entertainer girlfriend who gets to bare much in the sensual nightclub sequences. As much as I enjoyed the film, it is the type of movie that would take several viewings to really capture the essence of everything going on, but with such great dialog and performances, that really doesn't sound like an issue to me.

SUSPECTED PERSON is something of a dour potboiler with a dated romantic sub-plot serving to slow down the action even further. Clifford Evans plays the ordinary 'wronged man' kind of fellow who finds himself pursued both by ruthless gangsters as well as the police when he comes into possession, purely by accident, of some stolen money. It's the kind of plotline that would sustain British crime cinema in the 1950s, but here it's handled in a slow-moving way with an emphasis on largely uninteresting characters.

I agree with other reviewers that the dialogue is often hard to catch - especially at the start, when you have to concentrate to understand the story's premise. Audibility is not helped by a rather blurred print and low lighting in the early scenes. Raynor has absconded with the proceeds of a New York bank job, and two other gang members are on his trail.

He has some Robin Hood-like motive - he and his sister (Patricia Roc) were cheated out of part of their inheritance. I think - subtitles would have helped. He doesn't like to see her running an apartment house when she was supposed to be a lady of leisure. Perhaps he Did It All for Her.

The gangsters turn up, and rendezvous at a seedy house in London's docklands run by an excellent character actor (the doctor from Green for Danger). Scotland Yard - David Farrar and William Hartnell - go in pursuit.

All the gangsters' mugshots have been printed in the paper, and despite there being "eight million people in London" they all bump into each other at a shady nightclub, where Patricia Roc's friend and lodger has a job.

Despite everybody knowing WHO and WHERE everybody else is, the villains keep a step ahead by escaping through service entrances, sliding panels leading to the Thames, etc. Clifford Evans (Raynor) takes several trips to Holyhead.

Everyone is fooled by the old "newspaper instead of money" trick, but the money ends up - well, it doesn't float down the Thames or flutter along Limehouse Causeway, for a change.

David Farrar falls in love with Patricia Roc (who is excellent as always). The girls wear rather frumpy clothes, but the apartment house is done up stylishly in utility furniture and Art Deco wardrobes.