expensive and longer 1956 remake.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
This early Alfred Hitchcock (”Young and Innocent”/”Torn Curtain”/”Jamaica
Inn”) thriller is much more fun than the more expensive and longer 1956
remake with James Stewart and Doris Day. Hitch takes an implausible plot
and gives it life as an exciting suspense yarn that’s filled with a splendid
mix of slapstick and gallows humor, and terrific set-pieces. It proved
to be the international “breakthrough” film for the British director. It’s
the first English-speaking role (learned phonetically) by Peter Lorre.
Writers Edwin Greenwood and A.R. Rawlinson adapted it to film from an original
story by Charles Bennett & D.B. Wyndham Lewis.
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The Lawrences, Bob (Leslie Banks) and his wife Jill (Edna Best),
and their adolescent daughter Betty (Nova
Pilbeam), are Londoners on a skeet-shooting vacation at the ritzy
Swiss resort of St. Moritz. A convivial Frenchman working for the British
“foreign office” named Louis Bernard (Pierre Fresnay) is killed by a sniper
when dancing at a night-club with his friend Jill. While dying he tells
Jill there’s a message in a brush in his bathroom. The message tells of
an assassination about to take place in London of an important foreign
diplomat. At the British embassy, Bob receives a message from the assassin
saying they kidnapped Betty and if he blabs to the police they will kill
her. Back in London, the frantic couple enlists the help only of trusted
Uncle Clive (Hugh Wakefield) and track the gang down through the clues
from the message and by getting their location by tracing a call from the
kidnappers (which comes through the courtesy of the foreign office secretary
named Gibson). They first go to a dentist office on the East End and then
locate Betty being held in a nearby mission chapel by a cult sun worshipping
group. Meanwhile, even though Bob is held hostage by the spies led by the
smirking Abbott (Peter Lorre), Clive escapes and tells Jill that the assassination
will be tonight at a concert at the Royal Albert Hall (shot in the Lime
Grove studio and by using a painting by the academician Fortunino Matania
reflected with a mirror into the camera lens, it served as an impression
of the Albert Hall audience). Unable to contact the police, Jill goes to
the concert alone and screams before the sniper (Frank Vosper) can kill
the diplomat at the clash of cymbals. This saves the diplomat’s life, and
the climax has the marvelously staged police “Siege of Sidney Street.”
Jill, whom we already know is an excellent marksman from the first scene
in Switzerland, picks up a police rifle and kills the spy using her daughter
as a shield.
It might be too stagy for today’s standards, and we never learn why
the assassination attempt. But all that is forgiven
by how wonderfully incongruous it all turned out.