A forgettable programmer two-thirds of the way, this bare budget British Tabloid tale springs to life in a last act with enough style & suspense to make you wonder if new filmmakers were brought in. David Farrar impresses as usual*, here as a hotshot, deadline-skirting reporter, always on the verge of being fired by his demanding, combustible editor. Especially on his current assignment, a juicy love triangle with blackmail, pay-offs and cold-blooded murder. Real front page stuff with a bomb planted right in the middle: the editor’s wife is one side of the triangle. Yikes! Get the story and expose her; or lose the scoop and see the guilty party run off. If only the set up didn’t play like rote recitation of well-worn formulas shot in routine fashion with flairless efficiency by director John Harlow on compact sets. The sudden (if late) improvement quite unexpected. Even the sets improve. Check out a stylish movie-house lobby where Farrar meets an informer and spots a rendezvous between killer and editor’s wife. Not a one-off either, but leading to a series of smart scenes, a suspenseful climax on a getaway train, and a nifty wrap up set piece to round things off with a pair big romantic gestures to bring down the curtain. Too little, too late, I suppose. But still, nicely done.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Easy to imagine Warners doing this in the early ‘30s with James Cagney as charging reporter and Edward G. Robinson as cuckold editor. But they’d fix those first two acts.
DOUBLE-BILL: *Why didn’t David Farrar become a major star? The guy seemed to have it all; starring roles for Powell/Pressburger (BLACK NARCISSUS/’47; THE SMALL BACK ROOM/’49; GONE TO EARTH/’50), handsome, a fine actor, and a manly, unforced sexy swagger not matched in the U.K. till Sean Connery came on the scene. Perhaps the Stateside failure of GONE TO EARTH, disastrously refashioned by co-producer David O. Selznick as THE WILD HEART/’52, killed any Hollywood interest. (Make SMALL BACK ROOM your Double-Bill.)
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