Stunning cinematography by Gordon Dines and fine directive variety is let down by a top down police procedural plot centering around a stale, elitist core of characters, somehow still espousing attitudes of the 1890's in late 1950's Britain.
It is a distinct relief when the story briefly veers into the street life of the era, away from the plummy inanity of the office bound protagonists - Jack Hawkins referring to the unseen masses as 'them', the polemic of Empire 101 still dominating the administrative and ruling classes of this era and sewn into the poker straight characters and asexual women strewn throughout the cinema of mid-century Britannia.
The Royal Festival Hall as a nod to modernism is not enough to blunt the appalling military and public school attitudes still dominating populist cinema at this point in time. The leather driving gloves of the James Mason school of acting prevalent in so much inflexible dross of post-war British film had thankfully just a few years left to run its course.
It is a distinct relief when the story briefly veers into the street life of the era, away from the plummy inanity of the office bound protagonists - Jack Hawkins referring to the unseen masses as 'them', the polemic of Empire 101 still dominating the administrative and ruling classes of this era and sewn into the poker straight characters and asexual women strewn throughout the cinema of mid-century Britannia.
The Royal Festival Hall as a nod to modernism is not enough to blunt the appalling military and public school attitudes still dominating populist cinema at this point in time. The leather driving gloves of the James Mason school of acting prevalent in so much inflexible dross of post-war British film had thankfully just a few years left to run its course.