Val Guest (1962)
There’s no music in Jigsaw: it’s as if the film is too businesslike to be bothered with that kind of decoration. The absence of a score, although it doesn’t increase suspense exactly, does serve to concentrate your attention. Val Guest’s source material is a novel by Hillary Waugh, which the writer-director-producer relocates from Connecticut to Brighton – between the departure of Graham Greene’s gangsters and (just before) the arrival of mods and rockers. We don’t, however, see much of the pier, the promenade or funfairs. The murder which begins this black-and-white drama is committed in a house in Saltdean, a few miles out from the centre of Brighton, and much of the action takes place indoors – on the site of the crime, in police stations, at an estate agent’s office. It’s immediately clear that the young woman killed in the opening sequence (Moira Redmond) has died at the hands of a man she calls Johnny but Jigsaw is a whodunit nonetheless: Johnny’s face and physique have been obscured from view. The film is, even more, a true police procedural. Guest devotes considerable screen time to a search of the Saltdean house by Brighton CID and their quiet, conscientious work, as observed by the camera, is increasingly absorbing. A semi-documentary flavour is sustained right through to the end. When Detective Inspector Fred Fellows (Jack Warner) and his sidekick, Detective Sergeant Jim Wilks (Ronald Lewis), finally chance upon decisive evidence, Jigsaw simply stops. The police know they’ve got their man. Nothing more needs to be said or shown.
What’s more, Guest succeeds in orchestrating his cast so well that, with few exceptions, these familiar faces blend easily into the understated, slice-of-life narrative. Although the film was made when Dixon of Dock Green was an established feature of Saturday evening family television, Jack Warner (in his penultimate cinema role) is witty and authoritative but resists any temptation to be reassuring. Rightly so: it’s crucial that Fellows, Wilks and their colleagues, who include Ray Barrett as a prickly sergeant, struggle to fit together pieces of the jigsaw and make mistakes along the way. In a brief appearance as the father of the murdered woman, John Le Mesurier startlingly expresses shock and grief. The killer turns out to be Ray Tenby (John Barron), who works for the estate agent (Brian Oulton): even though we can make out little of Johnny at the start, it’s hard at the end to believe that tall, slim John Barron was the man we watched committing murder. But Yolande Donlan (Val Guest’s wife) is affecting as a lonely woman who has a lucky escape from Tenby, Michael Goodliffe credible as the salesman whom Fellows first suspects of being Johnny, and Norman Chappell amusing as a delivery driver: he claims to have a photographic memory and, on an ID parade, confidently picks the salesman out. (The driver’s right to do so but the police have misunderstood the nature of the salesman’s business at the house in Saltdean. This plot twist is nicely handled.) Reginald Marsh, who often played a bookie, appears here – sans moustache – as a pesky journalist.
14 September 2023
