|
Noir shadows in the seaside resort, Graham Greene's panoply. "Of course there's a hell. Flames, damnations, torments." "Heaven, too." "Maybe." A view entre deux guerres, the teen hoodlum with demons under his fedora, Richard Attenborough with some of Peter Lorre's alarming softness. Documentary shots of the teeming boardwalk yield to full expressionism on a roller-coaster named "Dante's Inferno," the muckraking reporter (Alan Wheatley) finds his watery demise amid grotesque funhouse faces. The strength of the murderer's alibi rests on an impressionable waitress (Carol Marsh), a simple enough solution: "I'm going courting. A wife can't give evidence." No help from the police, the music-hall trouper (Hermione Baddeley) launches an investigation of her own. "I'm a sticker where right's concerned." The Greene constellation of guilt and violence, meticulously mounted by John Boulting from Terence Rattigan's adaptation. Razor gangs in the Thirties, a "wages of sin" placard in a racetrack rumble, the camera's ominous curving pan to take in a cracked banister before an aged crook (Wylie Watson) is pushed down the stairs. "You can't damage a businessman." "I can damage you," cf. Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday. The warped youth could have been a priest, he spews venom in the recording booth while his wife beams outside in a hint of the mordant farce behind the Catholic anguish. The withered lawyer (Harcourt Williams) quotes the Bard and Marlowe, curses his own marriage and yearns for oblivion, virtually a Dennis Potter character. "I've sunk so deep I carry the secrets of a sewer." Faith blurs into delusion for the ending, only a world of scratched surfaces can find solace in Attenborough's indelible malevolence. With William Hartnell, Nigel Stock, Virginia Winter, Reginald Purdell, George Carney, and Charles Goldner. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |