Marc Allégret (1951)
I felt I ought to see something in BFI’s Mai Zetterling season – which includes her work as a director and as an actor – but Blackmailed was an unfortunate choice. This British thriller, directed by a Frenchman, doesn’t do justice to Zetterling or anyone else involved. I plumped for Blackmailed because the various contributors added up to a promising list. As well as Zetterling, the cast includes Dirk Bogarde, Fay Compton and Michael Gough. Roger Vadim, in his early twenties and assistant to director Marc Allégret at the time, shares the screenplay credit – with Hugh Mills, who had co-written the previous year’s So Long at the Fair, in which Bogarde also appears and which I’d recently enjoyed on television. James Robertson Justice, who plays the blackmailer in Allégret’s film, is an actor I don’t like but I knew from an online thumbnail plot description that the blackmailer got killed at an early stage, so this piece of casting seemed almost a bonus. Allégret’s direction lacks rhythm, though (as far as I can tell from IMDb, he didn’t direct another film in English subsequently) – and John Wooldridge’s score hardly compensates for that. Blackmailed is an odd creature – a listless melodrama. Its moral scheme is more noteworthy than any of the story’s supposedly intriguing elements.
The source material is a 1946 novel by Elizabeth Myers, Mrs Christopher. The title character is an almoner in a London hospital. (The hospital in Blackmailed looks to be a pre-NHS outfit, which chimes with the novel’s original publication date.) The film’s opening scenes give the impression that, although she’s not a medic, the place would fall to pieces without deeply conscientious Mrs Christopher (Fay Compton). When her brother Hugh Sainsbury (Harold Huth), who edits a local newspaper, arrives one evening to take her to the theatre, his sister says she’s too busy to join him. She goes instead on an errand, on behalf of Mary (Shirley Wright), a young patient admitted to the hospital earlier in the day after a traffic accident. Mary is distressed and anxious for an envelope containing money to be delivered by hand. Mrs Christopher makes her way to the home of the intended recipient, Mr Sine (James Robertson Justice), where she interrupts a dispute between him and a young woman (Mai Zetterling) about another payment apparently due to Sine. Mrs Christopher is instantly suspicious of what he’s up to – even more suspicious of the handgun she sees in Sine’s hand. While he’s in heated discussion with the two women, a young man (Dirk Bogarde) also turns up. Realising that the man of the house is a blackmailer, Mrs Christopher threatens to contact the police. A struggle ensues, a gunshot is heard and Sine falls dead. Mrs Christopher pulled the trigger.
Much of the rest of the film (which runs only eighty-five minutes) describes the predicaments of Zetterling’s Carol Edwards, tyrannised by her hypochondriac husband Maurice (Michael Gough) and in love with GP Giles Freeman (Robert Flemyng), and Bogarde’s Stephen Munday, a would-be painter but, more to the point, a military deserter, who’s trying desperately to get abroad with Alma (Joan Rice), his girlfriend and artist’s model. These characters are linked not just by Sine’s exploitation of them but also through Hugh Sainsbury’s paper’s offer of a reward for information on the identity of the blackmailer’s killer: first Maurice Edwards then Stephen Munday tries to get his hands on the reward. The latter succeeds, after delivering to Sainsbury the startling news that his sister is the guilty party, at which point the reward has turned into hush money.
A police detective arrives on cue at Sainsbury’s office and Stephen Munday makes a run for it. A moderately exciting rooftop chase sequence, which doesn’t end well for Stephen, leads into the film’s closing scene, where the Scotland Yard man says he has a few questions for Mrs Christopher. She calmly replies there’s no need for questions and admits responsibility for Sine’s death, informing the detective and her brother that ‘Our lives belong to God’. This moral heroine of the story, who dominates the first part of Blackmailed, is conspicuous by her absence from most of the intervening screen time, returning only at the last minute to do the decent thing. Mrs Christopher obviously must be kept out of the picture to let the plot take its course. The trouble is, she’s so evidently righteous from the word go that you don’t believe she’d hesitate to tell the police immediately what happened. And though Sine is its only outright villain, and the film has some sympathy for the blackmailees, it can’t, according to the prevailing moral code of the time, let them off the hook. A wife loved by a man she’s not married to, is duty bound to return to the husband who treats her abominably. A deserter can’t be allowed to escape.
To be fair to the cast, they treat their variously compromised characters sensitively. Fay Compton’s Mrs Christopher comes over as solemnly sincere rather than sanctimonious. Michael Gough makes the malingering ratbag Maurice vividly individual. And Dirk Bogarde does interesting things, of course – it’s striking that he’s more physically than vocally expressive here. Mai Zetterling, limited as her role is, is good enough to confirm my regret at choosing this film rather than one of the other offerings in BFI’s tribute to her.
14 May 2025
