Undescribable Perfection

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

In "Payment Deferred", Charles Laughton plays a mousy bank employee in severe financial crisis. In fact, unless he clears up his debts FAST, his boss has threatened to fire him. However, when his nephew from Australia (Ray Milland) shows up soon after, Laughton thinks he can get some money from this rich young man to bail him out of his problems. But Laughton comes on WAY too strong and frightens Milland--and there's no way he'll help Laughton. So, on the spur of the moment, Laughton offers Milland some poisoned whiskey and then robs his corpse--thus alleviating his debts.At this point, I thought the movie was very good. However, during the next portion of the film, Laughton's character is very inconsistent--one minute paranoid and on edge and the next, cold and at ease. To me this is a serious problem because he also goes from loving husband to unfaithful jerk--and it seemed more a plot device than anything else since it was not consistent with his character. And much of this final portion of the film was very good (such as what happened to his wife) some was pretty bad (emotionally he was a yo-yo--too much so). Frankly, his performance seemed, at times, over-the-top.I enjoyed "Payment Deferred" and do recommend it. However, I couldn't help but see a few shortcomings in this film because a dozen years later, Charles Laughton made another similar film but it was so much better. Unlike "Payment Deferred", "The Suspect" was perfect...or darn close. The biggest differences was that in "The Suspect" the audience really likes Laughton's character--he's a very good person who just happens to kill people--people that REALLY need it and you feel he is morally justified for his actions. However, in "Payment Deferred", Laughton is just an evil and selfish man--and the audience is NOT drawn to like him. My advice is see "The Suspect" and, if you are still inclined, try "Payment Deferred".

Charles Laughton starts chewing the curtains almost immediately in this grisly tale of greed and murder. Sir Charles had yet to tone down his film performances that would calibrate into some of the finest ever on screen and with Payment Deferred he's strictly a bull in a china shop.Bank clerk William Marble faces ruin with his family when a suddenly long lost nephew (Ray Milland) appears on his doorstep. Imploring him for a loan Marble is rebuffed and resorts to killing him. In a wild reversal of fortune he goes from ruin to riches but remains tortured and ultimately a victim of his own success which leads to his destruction.Lothar Mendes direction is stilted and it's clear he has no handle on Laughton who lurches erratically throughout, his inflection a work in progress. Maureen O'Sullivan and Verea Teasdale also seem to have caught what Laughton has, especially in the case of Teasedale's outrageously accented French seductress. Dorothy Peterson as Marble's suffering wife is both tragic and serene in the films only impressive performance.Mendes does supply some flashes of Hitchcock editing but for the most part the pace remains obvious and stilted; interspersed with glimmers of brilliance from Laughton followed by scene killing eruptions.

***MAJOR SPOILERS*** Crime & Punishment movie having to do with how justice works in strange and unusual ways in bringing the guilty to pay for their crimes. In this case William Mable, Charles Laughton, a man who got away with murder but was convicted and sent to the gallows for a murder, or really death, that he in fact didn't commit.Deep in debt and with no way out of his pressing financial problems William has his nephew from far off Australia James Medland, Ray Milland, show up at his dilapidated house, that he's behind in the rent, for a visit. Seeing that James has a wad of bills, in the hundreds of pounds, in his wallet William tries to talk him into going partners with him in the superlative British Foreign Exchange Currency Market. The overbearing William really gets under the good natured James skin who tells him to kindly get lost and stop bothering him with his both wild and cockamamie money schemes.Desperately wanting to get his hands on James cash William, in an effort to let bygones be bygones, offers him a departing drink that he secretly lased with deadly cyanide. Gulping the drink down in one shot James soon becomes history as well as part, in being buried there, of the Mable's backyard.Keeping both his wife Anne, Dorothy Peterson,and daughter Winnie, Maureen O'Sullivan, as well as the the police in the dark to James' fate it soon becomes evident that William in fact got away with murder. William got a bit lucky in the Foreign Exchange Market parlaying James stolen 100 pounds to an astonishing 30,000 in less then a month! With everything going great for him William falls victim to his next door neighbor clothing store owner Maggie Collins, Verree Teasdale, who's been eying the big oaf when she got wind that he was riding the gravy train as a result of the money he made in the market.Taking advantage of a lonely William, with his both wife and daughter away on vacation, Maggie seduced the big lug and later used the fact that he cheated on his wife Anne to blackmail him. Anne, suspecting something, who only thought that William embezzled the bank that he work at got the shock of her life when she caught William and Maggie smooching in the family living room! This while she was both sick and bedridden with pneumonia upstairs in the master bedroom!***SPOILERS*** Greatly depressed in the fact that her loyal and caring husband is cheating on her Anne took a drink of juice laced with cyanide and ended up dead the same way James, involuntarily, did. Arrested in is wife's murder William could only wait and face the music, or hangman, in a murder that he didn't commit but one that he did and got away with. In fact the strange fate of William Marble turned out to be a twisted case of poetic justice if there ever was one!

A family which is on it's way to the poor house suddenly acquires wealth because of a murder. The husband enters into an affair with a nefarious woman who, naturally, proceeds to blackmail him. The attempt to cover-up both the murder and the affair form the basis of this movie.The story line is a most interesting one. But, this film was made way back in 1932 and, by today's standards, the production is very dated and old fashioned. Charles Laughton, while undeniably a great actor, goes a bit "over the top" at times. The actress who plays his wife constantly overacts in a style that was probably "de rigeur" in the early 1930s but, to say the least, is somewhat annoying in these modern times. I am usually against remakes but I think that I would like to see a modern version of this story. I believe that it would be a very impressive film.