Do You Know This Voice?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.