Do You Know This Voice? (1964) User Reviews

Classic British thriller

[nova-63 · 7/10 · 22 January 2009]

A very unusual and effective British thriller. Duryea stars as a down and out man who plots a kidnapping. A series of events lead to the child's death. Duryea is still desperate for cash and tries to make arrangements to pick up the ransom. Police become aware of the child's death and lay a trap. The kidnapper slips through the police net but there is a witness. A neighbour was at the phone booth and saw the kidnapper leave the scene.

What makes this unusual thriller so good is the relationship between the kidnapper and his wife. They are desperate people who wish they could turn back time and the kidnapping had never happened. Duryea is a slightly slimy crook, his wife (Gwen Watford) sees her husband's flaws but she remains devoted.

A twist shock ending really brings this story to a crashing conclusion.

Engrossing Kidnapping Drama

[richardchatten · 6/10 · 18 January 2018]

The title of this film is the first of many feints this well-acted little thriller set in Bristol throws the audience, since it suggests a police procedural but then proves anything but. What seem to be being laid down as final twists are actually revealed surprisingly early all the better to confound expectations, while the relationship between the blundering villain and the one eyewitness pans out like a straight version of 'The Ladykillers' or 'A Fish Called Wanda'. As in most cheap British thrillers of the period, Arthur Lavis' black & white photography is beautifully clean and crisp.

Stand by your man

[bkoganbing · 6/10 · 6 July 2012]

Dan Duryea went to the other side of the pond to star in this very neat and no frills British noir film about a child kidnapping. At least that's how it starts.

Like Bruno Hauptman when he dropped the infant Lindbergh baby climbing out a ladder and killing him, Duryea snatches a child going to a somewhat posh English public school and promptly kills him, he says by accident.

Isa Miranda spots the ransom call being made though she paid no real attention to the caller, Duryea gets paranoid. It's his paranoia because she is a neighbor that drives the rest of the film.

That and the fact that Duryea's wife played by Gwen Watford gives an almost perfect performance of a battered spouse who stands by her man come what may.

You'll like this film, especially with a couple of nice twists in the end that I didn't see coming.

Dandy Dan Duryea doing dirty

[clore_2 · 12 May 2012]

Dan Duryea is once again a man down on his luck, so he opts for a new profession as a kidnapper. His inexperience shows as he kidnaps the son of some working class people who couldn't afford the ransom anyway, plus he accidentally kills the child. No spoiler here, this all comes out in the first fifteen minutes and just as exposition. On revealing that, he tells his wife who is also in on the plot, that the boy was "lucky to have died clean" - as in free of sin.

How considerate Dan! Otherwise, Dan's a nice guy who hung around in Britain after the war, he's nice to his neighbors, and that's where the tide turns. It seems that one of those neighbors, played by Isa Miranda, caught a glimpse of the kidnapper making a ransom call. She offers to help the police capture the man by making it public that she saw him and then just sitting as bait for the criminal.

She only saw the caller from the back, but that's a minor point as long as the caller doesn't know that.

All of this happens in the first twenty minutes, so don't worry about too much being spoiled. Some of it is only referred to anyway as it happens off-screen or even before the film starts.

From here on, as far as the story goes you're on your own. Unfortunately the director Frank Nesbitt not only telegraphs the ending, he writes it in the sky with gigantic letters by fixing the camera on a key prop that comes into play later.

Otherwise, the performances are tops and while it's obviously done on the cheap, that only enhances the look of the film which isn't exactly set among the upper class anyway.

Yes I do know it. One of the most sinister film noir villains ever.

[mark.waltz · 6/10 · 11 March 2022]

From "The Litttle Foxes" on Broadway to the film version, classic film noir and onto B westerns, Dan Duryea had quite a memorable career, and this British thriller is a late-in-life success (artistically if not at the box office) that showed how menacing he could be in a very subtle way. He has kidnapped and murdered a young boy, and the old woman (Isa Miranda) who supposedly overheard him on a payphone is a close acquaintance of his girlfriend Gwen Watford's. Duryea realizes the only way to not be exposed when he finds out that she saw him is to kill her, not realizing that she never saw his face, only overheard his disguised voice. Miranda has willingly made herself a planned so the killer will expose themselves, by chance, he ends up staying in her apartment along with a cop there for protection, so he has two victims to claim to add to the poor unfortunate kid.

Wearing a stocking over his head, Duryea looks quite frightening as he strikes, like a character out of a Lon Chaney Sr. Movie. Miranda (who was much younger than her character) is absolutely superb as the sweet old woman willing to risk her life to see Justice served, and with stooped shoulders, even that can't hide her loveliness. I'd seen her in the two American films she made years before (basically a Dietrich knockoff), and didn't think too much about her. But she is fantastic in this, someone you can truly root for, especially when she calls her willingness to risk her life a noble death.

This is quite a chilling British quota quickie, suspenseful from start to finish, and Duryea and Miranda are simply fantastic. Peter Madden as the police commander has the delightful type of face that would stop a clock, and along with the handsome Barry Warren (as the police officer staying with Miranda) adds fine support from the law enforcement represented on screen. The black and white photography really adds to the suspense, and the minimal give it the feel of a stage melodrama, very close to "Night Must Fall" and "Kind Lady" as it puts a sweet grandmotherly in jeopardy. A twist involving a pet may be disturbing to some viewers. At the end of the film, you truly feel sorry for Duryea, getting the worst possible kind of punishment.

B thriller lit up by Duryea and Miranda

[malcolmgsw · 7/10 · 25 December 2018]

This is an excellent b feature thriller starring 2 actors who were top notch.Initially it is about a kidnapping but then turns to Duryeas obsession with killing a potential witness.This in the end backfires on him in a catastrophic way.Incidentally one of the cats is called Bruno the name of the alleged kidnapper of the Lindbergh child.

A Good Crime Story

[Brian7250 · 7/10 · 2 February 2019]

A good suspenseful crime story, with some great performances, especially by Dan Duryea as the scheming bad guy. I liked his line when he realises what might happen if he's ever found out - "before ya know it, I'll be doing the trapdoor fandango". Well worth watching.

Good quality crime drama.

[r_hewitt · 7/10 · 8 November 2018]

Poor continuity with characters entering wrong different houses.

Fine Performance By Signorina Miranda

[boblipton · 7/10 · 22 June 2023]

A child is kidnapped in the mistaken belief the parents have money. A phone call is made from a public telephone. Then the corpse is found. The police speak to Isa Miranda, who used the public almost immediately after, but she was too involved with her own thoughts to notice anything. Nonetheless, she comes up with the idea of saying she did recognize the kidnapper to draw them out. The police say no, but she tells the newspaper she did, which forces the police to plant a plainclothesman in her house, and draw the attention of the kidnappers: next-door neighbors Dan Duryea and Gwen Watford. Duryea decides she has to die.

It's a very good cat-and-mouse game, with a fine performance my Signorina Miranda and a good one by Duryea., just clever enough to avoid the traps, spreading chaos as he goes along. With Peter Madden and Barry Warren.

Miranda Is Marvellous!!

[kidboots · 9/10 · 9 May 2016]

A distraught couple have called in the police when their little boy fails to arrive home from school. The British are masters of establishing emotion and motivation in even the smallest of parts and in the hands of Alan Edwards and Shirley Cameron, they manage to convey the deepest feelings of parents faced with that awful situation in the small amount of screen time they are given. The husband, empty but stoical, feels that because they have scrimped and saved to send their child to a good school, the kidnappers (there has been a ransom demand) may think the parents are wealthy when they are anything but.

In another part of the neighbourhood, Rosa Marotta is indulging in a bit of harmless banter with her likable neighbour John but when the story of the kidnapping hits the newspapers the reaction of John's wife proves they are heavily implicated. And from a chilling, off the cuff, remark of John's "yes, he died but it was an accident and anyway he's better off now" show that he is a dangerous sociopath.

Duryea gives one of his great performances, possibly his best but he has to compete with Isa Miranda (an Italian actress, known for the 1939 film "Hotel Imperial") and the story is told from her perspective. She is in the middle of calling her niece when she is literally jumped upon by two policemen who tell her that the person who used the call box before her was the kidnapper. She wants to help but at the same time the person was leaving the booth she was scrambling for her fallen coins and only got to see the kidnapper's shoes. Miranda is marvellous as the elderly Italian woman who feels she has let the police down and wants to put herself forward as a decoy - she will go to the newspapers claiming she is a witness to the ransom call and then sit back to see if the kidnappers come for her. She doesn't reckon on the relentlessness of John who she still regards as a friend but who is quietly determined to end the poor lady's life.

The story isn't perfect. Even though John gives viewers a glimpse of his "loser" lifestyle, it's hard to believe that with his merciless attitude to the boy's death, he hasn't tried something like this before. Gwen Watford is terrific as the decent wife who is driven to the edge by what John has done. She is almost too decent and I feel Megs Jenkin would have been perfectly cast.

There dare many edge of seat moments - like when all other methods fail, John succeeds in poisoning Rosa's milk while it's still on the doorstep and the nail biting scene as cups of tea are poured and John even pops around to see how it all goes!!

Very Recommended.

Kidnap and murder, classic crime.

[Sleepin_Dragon · 8/10 · 22 February 2019]

When Mrs. Marotta sets about to telephone her Niece, she doesn't realise that she's inadvertently witnessing a blackmailer make a call to their victim.

Isa Miranda was terrific as Mrs. Marotta, a tough cookie who sets about catching the cruel miscreant herself, unaware that it's someone close to home. Fans of thrillers and mysteries will I'm sure enjoy this little mystery, it's well made, very well acted, and loaded with intrigue. The performances in general are excellent, I loved Dan Duryea, he was so menacing, so controlling, Gwen Watford was equally good as his desperate lover. I also enjoyed Peter Madden's performance as Supt. Hume, what a face.

After about fifteen minutes I thought I was watching a bit of a potboiler, but it's so much more then that, it's loaded with malice and spite, and features a great twist in the ending.

Impressive, 8/10

Kitchen sink crime

[Leofwine_draca · 5/10 · 25 November 2018]

DO YOU KNOW THIS VOICE? is a cheap British crime drama that seems to have spent all of its money on importing aged American star Dan Duryea. For once he plays the villain of the piece, a child kidnapper looking to make a great deal of cash, except of course things go wrong and rather quickly. This small-scale drama feels like a cheap riff of the better SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON, which had the depth this film lacks, and the action seems to be limited to two small enclosed households. Duryea is a boring antagonist and the protagonists little better; the female roles tend to be more interesting than the male ones here. Best of the bunch is Peter Madden, shining as the detective on the case. The film has some fun macabre elements involving poisoning, but it never really picks up like it should.

Performances better than the film.

[johnshephard-83682 · 5/10 · 9 December 2019]

Although this film begins with a bungled kidnapping, which results in the accidental death of the child victim, attention quickly focuses on local resident Mrs Marotta (Isa Miranda, a new name to me), who has unwittingly caught a glimpse of one of the perpetrators, mostly their shoes. We learn very early on that the villains are her affable American neighbour Hopta (Dan Duryea) and his strangely loyal wife (Gwen Watford). Hopta is a psychopath, and he decides that, as he can't be sure how much Mrs Marotta has witnessed, she has to die too, and the rest of the film follows his various attempts to get the job done. There's a touch of black comedy about these sequences, which include the most fast-acting poison ever seen on screen, and a policeman who is installed to sleep in Mrs Marotta's spare room as 'protection' and is consequently useless. There are solid performances from the main players, particularly Duryea and Miranda, who are, frankly, better than the material deserves. The main flaw for me is the character of Mrs Hopta, whose devotion to her sicko husband, and compliance in his crimes, stretches credibility somewhat, as , in every other respect, her nature seems to contradict such willingness to collude. Maybe that's the point, but I wasn't convinced. So, flawed, but watchable, chiefly as a chance to catch Isa Miranda.