John Guillermin (1957)

This British-made thriller was released by Columbia, which may explain its bizarre attempts at Americanisation.   The star John Mills, as Superintendent Mike Halloran, speaks a hardboiled lingo and in a mid-Atlantic accent – Mills is uncomfortable with both.   In Oakley Park, the anonymous English town of the title, the police cars always screech to a halt and their doors are flung open before they’ve stopped.  The cast includes a couple of American actors – Charles Coburn as a Canadian doctor and Barbara Bates as his niece Elizabeth (and Halloran’s girlfriend in due course).   The punchy title, which also has a transatlantic ring, makes less and less sense.  It implies that the whole ethos of Oakley Park comes under suspicion when a young woman is murdered there – that appears to be how Mike Halloran sees it too.  But when Elizabeth says crossly to him at one point, ‘There are 50,000 people in this town – how many have you met?  About twelve!’, you can’t argue with her.  Unless all the citizens are the same as the members of the local sports club, which is a prime focus for the story, it’s hard to see what Oakley Park is like at all – except that it’s a place where, at one point, the police hand back to a man they suspect of murder potentially incriminating evidence.

Town on Trial, under the faux-American surface and in spite of the menace of rock ‘n’ roll and a brief appearance by Teds, has a ration-book screenplay by Ken Hughes and Robert Westerby.   There are pitifully few suspects – three in fact.   It can’t be the nasty-piece-of-work secretary of the sports club (Derek Farr), a boozy womaniser with a bogus military history – that would be too obvious even for this film.  The septuagenarian doctor with a shady past is physically incapable of climbing through a bedroom window to steal the wherewithal for the second murder.  So it has to be Peter Crowley, the mousy, mother-dominated young man whom the girls despise and who exudes inadequacy.  The scene in which he’s revealed as the guilty party is hilarious.  The killer leaves at the scene of his crimes a verse from Ezekiel (23:5):

‘And Aholah played the harlot when she was mine; and she doted on her lovers, on the Assyrians her neighbours.’

Halloran reads out this verse to the three suspects for them to write out; he adds part of the next verse for good measure – a verse that includes the word ‘judgment’.   Crowley is nailed because he spells the word ‘judgement’, as on the killer’s notes.  I know that spelling was better and religious knowledge greater in the 1950s than now but the idea that John Mills can dictate these words – at speed and with his funny American consonants – and each one of the trio takes them down without turning a hair is hard to credit.  The mental case culprit (Alec McCowen) and his mother (Fay Compton) supply the best acting in Town on Trial.   The worst, against stiff competition, comes from Elizabeth Seal as the flighty, wilful daughter of a malignant stuffed shirt (Geoffrey Keen).  Seal is, however, a spectacular dancer.   Barbara Bates is an odd performer.  She makes Elizabeth too pertly disrespectful towards Halloran in their early scenes – I guess this is meant to indicate there’s mutual attraction in the air but once the liaison is underway Bates is rather pallid.  Mills, by contrast, is relaxed and a lot better in these romantic bits, mechanically conceived as they are, than when he’s trying to solve the crimes.   This is not John Guillermin’s finest hour, although the preposterously spectacular climax on a church steeple may have been useful training for directing King Kong twenty years later.  With Harry Fowler, Raymond Huntley, Dandy Nichols and Margaretta Scott.

1 May 2012