After Dark

The plot of this extremely short feature revolves around several emeralds. A young man is returning home on a boat with the gems when he meets a an older man and his niece. While traveling on the night train the older gentleman drugs our hero and takes the gems. When he wakes up and realizes that the gems are gone he goes in search of the man and his niece (who knows nothing of what her uncle has done) at the address he was given by the girl. The uncle realizing that he is being pursued hides the gems in a clock in a shop which then is sold before anyone can recover them. The remainder of the film then takes place at the spooky mansion where the clock now resides.

If you think I've said to much understand that thats about the first 15 minutes of the films 45. From about that point on the film becomes even more confused as characters come and go in and out doors and windows in order to recover the gems. Actually to be honest the film is confusing from the get go with way too many characters, all wanting the gems, crashing through this film for its own good.

I'm not a fan of this film. Its an okay attempt by an English producer to make one of the old dark house films that American producers were churning out with great regularity at the time.Unfortunately it was done in the "short feature" length that some producers used to make to fill quotas for British film production. The idea was to make British films to play with American ones so they met the quota, this was done by any means possible including cutting the length. The actors are game, but the script, which is based upon a play, is way too loaded with characters and situations to play in the running time alloted. I like that the film kept moving, but I disliked how it breezed over too many plot points. Yes you get most of the required information, but you do so at a speed that makes it difficult to process what you're seeing.

Understand that this is not a bad movie, its not, but it isn't a great one either. Its an okay movie that could have been something if they had stretched this out to an hour or so.

Is it worth seeing? If you can rent it and are doing so knowing that its only 45 minutes and you have something else to watch I'd rent it. If you have the opportunity to purchase I wouldn't do so unless I was paying about the cost of a rental fee and no more.

6 out of 10. Good enough to make you wish it were better.

This is a quota quickie made by Fox British pictures at Nettlefold Studios,presumably to support on of their American films. Fox in fact subsequently acquired Wembley Studios for production of their films. This studio was subsequently used for the first television productions by Associated Redifusion tv in 1955.

The leading man is a very young Hugh Williams,who became a leading man from the thirties through to the fifties.

The director,So Parker,was an American,who made many films in the UK till the financial crash of 1938 and then became an agent.

Like many quota quickie this was based on a stage play,so obviously they didn't solve the problem of shoehorning a 3act play into a 45 minutes film.

After Dark (1932)

** (out of 4)

British attempt at the American "old dark house" theme has a man robbed of some jewels on a train and he tracks them down to a creepy house, which might contain a ghost or just someone trying to scare him away. It's rather interesting to compare British horror or mystery films compared to the U.S. ones. I'm not sure if it was due to censors but British films were certainly very tame in every way possible. That's no exception here in this short (45-minutes) film that really doesn't have a thing going for it. The acting is all rather bland as is the story, which never even seems to go for any scares. Usually these types of films contain a "lets have something jump out and scare those watching" but that doesn't happen here. The film is pretty rare and hard to see but I wouldn't recommend spending too much time searching for it.

"After Dark" is a British B-movie clocking in at only 45 minutes...and I didn't mind this because it wasn't especially good. What are the problems? Well, despite an interesting story idea, the picture is very talky and lacks suspense.

The story begins with a crook spotting a potential mark while he's traveling with his niece. It seems the man she's fallen for has some valuable emeralds and he plans on stealing them along with his partner. They mug the guy and leave him tied and gagged...and the niece walks in to find her boyfriend this way! What's next? Well, a grumpy old man who loves yelling at his dumb nephew (a completely unnecessary set pf characters) and a LOT of talk!

As I watched, I just kept thinking that with a better director and dialog the film could have been most enjoyable. Sadly, it really wasn't.

By the way, one of the actors was Ian Fleming...NOT the one who wrote the Bond books...another Ian Fleming.