Film noir may have originated in Hollywood in the 1940s, but it didn’t confine itself to the national boundaries of the United States for long. The combination of high-stakes stories told through complex characters and intriguing plots, a distinctive visual style, and conventions that allowed low-budget films to shine meant it was imitated in many different countries. One of those countries was the United Kingdom, whose noir output Kino Lorber has been chronicling through its Brit Noir series. The fourth installment of this collection includes three interesting films reminiscent of American B-movies of the period with the additional benefit of that English specialty, minor characters that make a big impression (consider the Harry Potter franchise). Does that have to do with many British film actors having substantial stage experience? I don’t know but it seems a hypothesis worth investigating.
None of these films check the boxes to be archetypal noir, but each borrows something from the genre. What is most lacking is a sense of moral ambiguity characteristic of many classic American noirs. Instead, in these films good is good, bad is bad, and characters don’t change so much as they reveal their true colors. Judgments placed on female characters are particularly harsh, but sexism was the order of day in the 1950s. Two of the three plots deal with geopolitical threats involving spies, foreign influence and corrupt political parties, while the third centers around plain old greed and the desire for the luxuries that money can buy.
Wendy Toye’s The Teckman Mystery (1954) opens with a meet-cute between Philip Chance (John Justin), an author assigned to write a biography of a recently deceased pilot, Martin Teckman, and Martin’s sister Helen (Margaret Leighton), who just happens to be reading one of Philip’s books. They’re both stunningly attractive in a 1950s movie sort of way: Philip is quite the peacock with his elaborate hairdo and series of smart suits paired with attention-getting ties and vests, while Helen has the glamour look expected of starlets of the day. So you can expect a romance will soon be brewing even as geopolitics are also referenced: Martin belonged to a suspect political organization which is never specified but, given the time and place, probably means the authorities think he was a Communist sympathizer.
The most intriguing minor character in this film bears the very British name of John Rice, but as he’s played by the Yiddish theatre actor Meier Tzelniker, has a Mitteleuropa accent, and wears ill-fitting suits, you can guess that the name was chosen as cover. He represents an American magazine who wants to throw a lot of money at Philip so you could argue whether the character is stereotypically Jewish or stereotypically American or both, but Tzelniker makes him interesting even while signaling his essential non-Britishness.
The Teckman Mystery spends most of its running time as a straight-up murder mystery which is resolved, Agatha-Christie style, by a character simply telling you what happened, but it also branches into police procedural with a Hitchcock-like sequence and great use of real locations. It’s enjoyably bizarre at times and communicates a presumed sense of decent British values which only the bad guys transgress. Director Wendy Toye is a name worth knowing: she made her stage debut at age 3 and worked successfully as a dancer, choreographer, and stage and theatre director at a time when directing, in both the U.S. and the U.K., was a profession primarily reserved for men (in the U.S., Ida Lupino is the shining exception).
Don Chaffey’s Time is My Enemy (1954), based on the play Second Chance by Ella Adkins, is a straight-up crime drama starring Dennis Price as the ruthless small-time criminal Martin Radley. His wife Barbara (Renée Everton), believing he was killed in the Blitz, has since married the wealthy publisher John Everton (Patrick Barr). As it happens, Martin just skipped out for an extended period (presumably avoiding military service in the process), but now he’s back and sees the opportunity to blackmail his wife, who has unknowingly become bigamously married. She pays up at first, but then he wants more because he’s being blackmailed by an accomplice after Martin kills a jeweler during a robbery. And there are more twists and turns to come because this story leans heavily on melodramatic conventions to keep the story moving.
Blackmail only works when people keep secrets, and John seems like a decent person who truly loves his wife, so you could be forgiven for wondering if the central dilemma could be easily resolved if Barbara would just sit down and have an honest conversation with her husband, particularly since the “wrong” committed was due to a misunderstanding. Given the plot contrivances, Time Is My Enemy lives or dies on the strength of the performances, and in this case it lives primarily through Price’s performance as a guy who has no bottom when it comes to looking out for himself. American actor Bonar Colleano makes a strong impression in almost no screen time (you’ll remember him even if you haven’t seen him before).
The really interesting minor role, however, is that of pawnbroker Ernie Gordon (Alfie Bass), a somewhat shady character (thank goodness someone is morally ambiguous!) who also recognizes the law and knows what’s good for him. Bass, born Abraham Basalinsky in Bethnal Green, was an interesting actor who appeared in a variety of stage, film, radio, and television roles, and was also a labor activist who took part in the Battle of Cable Street (1936) which prevented the British Union of Fascists from marching through the East End of London.
Time is My Enemy at 64 minutes is the slightest of the three films in this collection and adheres heavily to a melodramatic bag of tricks to keep the story moving. It was mostly shot in the studo, with a cleverly constructed sequence suggesting a chase sequence through night-time London, and is mostly interesting togay for Price’s performance and as an example of a low-budget British movie of the times.
Val Guest’s They Can’t Hang Me (1955) opens with a banger of a pre-title sequence: we see, in shadow, a man killing a woman, followed by an expressionist-tinged trial ending with the defendant, now convicted of murder, shouting out the film’s title. After the title sequence, They Can’t Hang Me settles into the more conventional territory of a police procedural as Inspector Ralph Brown (Terence Morgan) leads an investigation leads an investigation to see if there’s anything to the convicted man’s (senior civil servant Robert Pitt, played by André Morell) claims that he has important information the British government would like to know because it is “vital to the security of the country.”
Pitt has run out of appeals when he makes this claim and is scheduled to be executed in five days, so the police are suspicious that he’s just stalling for time. There’s a double ticking clock in this film, since the information Pitt wants to trade involves the identity of a foreign spy named “Leonidas” who is about to leave the country. The Cold War angle is the primary engine that keeps the story moving, while the film includes some good location shooting (most importantly at the Chertwell Atomic Research Station) along with stock footage and studio work.
The American actress Yolande Donlan plays Brown’s fiancé Jill Wilson, apparently to reassure us that he’s not gay since he seems to spend almost all his time in the company of men. She makes no attempt to appear English and in fact plays what British audiences might have thought of as a quintessential American woman, a wisecracking good sport who’s used to being perpetually stood up by her work-obsessed husband and yet remains sexy and available when he does find time for her. Donlan does what she can with the role but is trapped by the one-note characterization.
A more interesting character in a small role is Harold (Reginald Beckwith), Brown’s genial and somewhat effeminate butler (! I guess British cops were paid surprisingly well) who has an encyclopedic knowledge of antiques. Harold also seems to have spent some time on the wrong side of the law, which is the meaning I take from his remark that he used to be “in the trade,” although that phrase also has a queer meaning. The plot is salted with incidents that make him look suspicious which forms part of a general pattern of misdirection (one subplot involves Polish nationals hoping to free their homeland from Soviet repression) in which this film abounds.
They Can’t Hang Me includes some oddities that make it particularly worth a watch. For one, it’s franker than most American movies of the time about the existence of prostitution and the wisdom of police ignoring one kind of criminal behavior to pursue bigger fish. There’s a risqué sequence when Harris, looking very modern in stretch pants, turns up to serve Brown dinner in his own flat, only to be greeted by Brown coming out of the shower wearing only a towel. Another interesting point: the shooting sequences seem like elements dutifully included because they’re part of the genre, with little effort made to make deaths from gunfire look realistic. Whether that was due to censorship, a lack of the necessary technology, or just not knowing what actually happens when a person is shot is open to debate. I lean toward the explanation that because guns were less available in Britain than the U.S., the concept of death by gunfire was something of a foreign concept to both filmmakers and audience so they didn’t spend much time trying to make the gunplay look real. | Sarah Boslaugh
Brit Noir Collection IV is distributed on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. Extras include an audio commentary on The Teckman Mystery by film historian Daniel Kremer, on Time Is My Enemy by film historian Laurene Lerman, and on They Can’t Hang Me by film historian and writer Julie Kirgo and writer and filmmaker Peter Hankoff, and trailers for five films.
