One of my all time favorites.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

This is a little British murder mystery, not a noir. The main character is a nice shlub, not a tough guy. There is very little tension or menace and certainly not any cynicism or existential despair. The dialog and bits of business are pretty funny and practically everyone in the film, including the villain, seems basically likable. Dane Clark does a very good job, although he will go on to do better. The plot offers a steady diet of red herring, but plot is not this film's strong suit. The whole thing is so likable that you may find yourself cringing that the plot and twists and turns seem so aimless and gratuitous, but it doesn't pretend to be more than a grade B movie with some good acting and good dialog.

Drunken Dane Clark is picked out one night by a British socialite (Belinda Lee) who wants a marriage of convenience in order to receive an inheritance. This results in the murder of her father and the exposure of a sinister scheme for the villain to get control of the estate. Clark gets more than he bargained for as he tries to keep his name out of the list of suspects, questioning witnesses before he learns the not-so-surprising truth. A notch above the usual puzzling structure of similar tales (a staple of noir), this retains interest through a variety of eccentrics, dropping clues here and there to keep you guessing. Nobody is a shoe-in when it comes to being revealed to be the mastermind behind all the intrigue, and nobody is obviously innocent, either. That makes things much more intriguing and keeps the element of surprise always at a high. It softens a bit when Clark introduces Lee to his estranged family, but it doesn't remain soft for long.

While interesting for the footage of London circa 1954, this is an absurd movie. The story line is almost impossible to follow. There's almost no dramatic tension. The situations and supposed relationships are so unrealistic that even willing suspension of disbelief doesn't work. The protagonist is gullible and hard to swallow as a supposed tough guy when he spends so much time playing the fool to beautiful women and whimpering like a small boy to his mother, etc. And to top it off, it really doesn't strike me as a film noir at all, just a confusing murder mystery. The best thing about it is Belinda Lee, previously unknown to me, a beautiful woman who was killed a few years later, at 26, in a California car accident.

The film begins with Dane Clark being offered a strange marriage proposal from a woman he just met. Not only that, she offers this drunk guy 500 pounds to do the deed! However, upon waking up the next morning, he finds he's implicated with murder and there's no trace of the lady! So, it's up to tough-guy Clark to investigate and clear his name.Most fans of Film Noir will be surprised to hear that the British (not to mention, the French) made quite a few of these in the 1950s. Oddly, the Brit Noir films were made by Hammer Studios--the same folks who made tons of Dracula, Frankenstein and Mummy films from the late 50s to the mid 1970s! And, oddly, this film is directed by the studio's foremost monster film director, Terence Fisher.Overall, while this is far from a great film, it does stack up pretty well with the average American example, though I will admit that this film does have a few too many twists and turns (particularly for the character of Phyllis Brunner).