User Reviews

I think "writers_reign" is being rather too hard on this short. The original story was just something to fill in a commuter journey and this is the film equivalent. Implausible? Of course. Badly acted? I thought not. I did manage to suspend disbelief for a while, and that is entirely due to the smooth professionalism of Wolfit, Medwin and Losey, and the splendid seaside photography. The film tells a story coherently, and maintains tension. We know the wicked Max must in the end be foiled but we are puzzled to know how this will be achieved, and the film's ending is more successful than the original story. Nor do I find it completely unlikely that somebody in a dim interior where the lights don't work would always realise that his host, who finds his way around confidently, is blind.

Incredibly this piece of cheese was the first British movie on which Joseph Losey got a director credit under his own name, one I'm fairly sure he would have been happy to forego. Jimmy Sangster provided not so much a screenplay as a king-sized colander with implausibility leaking out of every hole and inept acting doing nothing to plug the gaps. Outside a casino presumably in Northern France, chauffeur Michael Ripper, waiting for his employer, asks a group of children not to laugh at the lady again, telegraphing that there is something peculiar about her. Cut to the casino where the lady in question, clearly Michael Medwin in unconvincing drag, is at the tables. He finishes playing and is invited into the Manager's office where, inexplicably there is a large amount of cash - clearly several thousand pounds - lying on the table. The manager offers champagne to what is clearly a regular patron whereupon Medwin knocks him out, puts the money in a case and leaves, pausing only to tip the croupier. Ripper drives him to the airport and they pause near a beach to enable Medwin to change out of drag. Having done so he pulls a gun on Ripper rather than sharing the loot. Ripper runs away, they struggle and Medwin is shot. Nevertheless he gets the better of Ripper, places him behind the wheel and pushes the car off a cliff. Then he finds a house on the beach with nobody home. Eventually Donald Wolfit, clearly a blind man, shows up and incredibly Medwin does not peg him as a blind man. The local seagulls dined on better garbage than this.