The Limping Man

Absorbing little co-feature that holds the interest. It would be worth the price of admission if not for the I-want-my-money-back ending. Nice acting jobs all around, Miss Lister in particular. Good workmanlike performance by the dependable Lloyd Bridges. The picture didn't drag and moved along at a nice clip. In truth, I didn't mind the ending as I felt the plot was starting to dig a hole for itself which made the ending rather timely. Had never seen this picture in TV listings - I had a DVD copy which was quite good. Makes you wonder how many other underrated films never made it to a format of any kind, and are now gone forever.

The Limping Man is a fairly bland British B grade Noir with Lloyd Bridges imported from America to play the lead role and add appeal to a wider audience. The plot follows a reasonably intriguing path towards what should/could have been a dramatic conclusion before reaching a disappointing ending that might have been borrowed from a children's story. Despite this, the film has its moments with fine performances from Bridges and Alan Wheatley as the Inspector. Leslie Phillips appears as the inspector's subordinate and, as always, is typecast as the ladies man who ogles everything in a dress.

Although the ending is flawed the film still has appeal as an interesting example of British Film Noir.

It was quite common in the '50s for British B-pictures to feature a fairly famous American star in the main role. Presumably most British B-movies would not otherwise have been granted an American release. In this film, it is the turn of Lloyd Bridges to lend his talents to a brief, brisk and reasonably entertaining mystery flick.

Bridges plays Franklin Pryor, a former US soldier returning to Britain in the 1950s to rekindle a wartime romance with Pauline French (Moira Lister). As he disembarks from the plane at London Heathrow, Pryor witnesses the assassination of another passenger, gunned down by a sniper as he walks from the plane to the terminal. To make matters worse, when Pryor reunites with his old flame she seems to know more about the killing than she is letting on. The police even begin to suspect that Pryor himself may have had a role in the murder.

The script is reasonably engrossing, starting with the mysterious murder and building from there with plenty more intriguing goings-on. Indeed, for a while the film threatens to become something far cleverer and far more unpredictable than most films of its ilk. However, it is let down (badly at that) by a totally thoughtless twist ending which will have most viewers groaning in disappointment. Still, apart from the feeble climax this is a decent little thriller, well worth 80 minutes (or thereabouts) of anybody's time. It's a difficult film to track down, but if you're lucky enough to find it it'll do nicely for a rainy day.

In a parody of "The Famous Writers' School" a teacher recommends that no matter what corner you have painted yourself into, literarily, you can always end it with "then I got run over by a truck." In this film the audience is run over by a truck. It takes a nicely orchestrated set of events and cheapens them badly. This is the tale of a man who finds himself in the middle of some intrigue and blackmail. There are nice plot twists all along the way, especially involving the female protagonist who has gotten herself in some big time trouble. Lloyd Bridges is sort of along for the ride. We keep waiting for him to be more than an observer, but he never rises above that. Still I was involved until the moronic ending.

There is a strict rule with IMDb reviews not to reveal the ending, so that shall remain undescribed. Up until that point, this is a very solid post-War British noir. American actor Lloyd Bridges plays a former American army captain who returns to England six years after the end of the War to renew a romance with his old flame, played by Moira Lister. She has become involved with a petty criminal and has been blackmailed by him when she tried to break off with him a year earlier. There are some good atmospheric shots down along the Thames in the East End of London at now-vanished riverside locations; it is ironical that much of what survived the German bombing has been destroyed in the past twenty years by developers, and the only way to see it now is in old movies like this one. Rachel Roberts, in her second film, plays a barmaid at the Spread Eagle pub in the East End. She was later to marry Rex Harrison, and she became a favourite British film actress in the 1960s, her most famous role being in 'This Sporting Life' (1963). She committed suicide in 1980 at the age of only 53. The 'limping man' of the title is a mysterious limping sniper who assassinates Lister's man friend on the runway at London airport, just as Bridges turns and asks him for a light for his cigarette. The police eventually discover the coincidence of Bridges being present at the murder of the man who had been involved with Lister, whom Bridges then visits, so that it all looks like a complicated conspiracy. But Bridges, like all square-jawed American heroes, is innocent, of course. However, what is Moira Lister's role in all of this? And why does she act so strange? What is really going on? It is a really good yarn, but then, as I have already pointed out and as other reviewers have also loudly complained, there is an absurd ending which infuriates the viewer, which is why so many reviewers have been highly upset. If you can brace yourself for that disappointment, the film is well worth watching.