Robert Hamer (1949)

It’s quite amusing but – if you’ve not seen it for years and are expecting a classic – a bit tedious too.  The script (by Hamer and John Dighton – based on the 1907 novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal by Roy Horniman) is often elegant and confident.  It also includes a good deal of laborious sarcasm.  Alec Guinness’s incarnations of the various members and generations of the D’Ascoyne dynasty – the eight obstacles in the way of Louis Mazzini’s inheriting the family fortune – are an amazing collection of caricatures.  The pleasure of their company derives more from observing Guinness at work than the D’Ascoynes themselves.  I’d forgotten, and was disappointed, that some of them come and go very quickly.  My particular favourites are the suffragette Lady Agatha, whether at street level or in the hot air balloon in which she meets her end, and the young photography addict Henry, an early victim.   As the suave serial killer, Denis Price is witty and accomplished:  he’s unvarying too but that isn’t a problem – it complements Guinness’s theatrical versatility.  What is a problem is that Price’s suavity mutes the vengefulness that drives Mazzini; this is a black comedy of such easy assurance that it verges on calm complacency.  As the two main women in the story (aside from Lady Agatha), Valerie Hobson is wasted as Henry’s wife-widow; Joan Greenwood, as the crafty Sibella is vocally and facially distinctive of course but, like Price, she becomes a little monotonous.   I could have done with less of Mazzini’s trial, which goes on way too long, and much more of Miles Malleson (as the hangman) and Arthur Lowe (marvellous in a cameo as a Tit-Bits reporter hanging around the condemned cell).

23 August 2011