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Sunday, July 19, 2020

CLOUDBURST (1951)

If made in the States, this might have been a smart, brooding, first-rate low-budget film noir. Yet it barely rates a ‘meh’ under British execution. No egregious fails in production, simply a sense of going thru the motions for limited returns. Robert Preston, a Hollywood ‘name’ to help get Stateside distribution, probably needn’t have bothered to make the trip. Not that he’s anything but perfectly fine as a WWII vet, now running a government de-coding office, who loses his pregnant wife (Elizabeth Sellars) to a reckless driver. Calling on old army pals for undercover expertise in fingering driver & passenger, Preston plots his revenge. And, even as Scotland Yard types close in, makes the punishment fit the crime. He’s got nothing to live for anyway. Preston, such a joie de vivre acting presence, had played the bad guy before, but never this downbeat.* He’s good, too. But tepid direction from Frances Searle, along with his unvaried walking pace, keep this from getting up to speed or building much tension. (And an attempt to work Preston's coding job into the story goes nowhere.)   Cinematographer Walter Harvey pulls off some effective shooting when they let him go outside, but drab, evenly lit interiors dominate. Lots of wasted promise on this one.

DOUBLE-BILL: With film work drying up, Preston segued to tv & the stage, eventually leading to his musical reinvention in THE MUSIC MAN and high-profile (if still sporadic) movie leads. *See him play noir villain (against Robert Mitchum) in Robert Wise’s psychological Western BLOOD ON THE MOON/’48.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Second-billed Elizabeth Sellars leaves the scene even earlier than Janet Leigh famously does in PSYCHO/’60.

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