Grand National Night

Found this little gem when browsing for this type of film (British B films) on Amazon.

Nigel Patrick plays a very decent sort, he's a racehorse trainer who happened to train the grand National winner. Moira Lister who looks absolutely gorgeous plays his unfaithful drunken wife.

The plot revolves around what happened after the horse wins the big race, when the wife provokes her husband, character name Gerald Coates so much he does her in. Foolishly as per normal he tries to get away with it instead of coming clean and claiming self defence of course this backfires and a murder investigation begins lead by a tenacious detective from the yard played by the excellent Michael Hordern.

All in a all a very enjoyable thriller with a fine ending

Nigel Patrick stars with Moira Lister in The Wicked Wife from 1953.

Patrick plays Gerald Coates, a wealthy horse breeder whose horse wins the Grand National. His wife Babs (Lister) is an unhappy drunk. Her driver's license has been revoked, but after a row with a drunken friend in Liverpool, she drives home in bad weather. Her husband is furious. They quarrel; she falls and dies.

Her body is found in the car in Liverpool. The police see that the car drove 44 miles - meaning to them that she drove 22 miles home from Liverpool. Gerald denies she ever returned.

Good movie as Gerald tries to have savior faire in the face of evidence - her shoes, her compact from her evening bag found in the couch, and, most devastating, a train ticket from the husband's macintosh pocket showing he returned from Liverpool that night despite saying he was home.

Nice twist at the end. Entertaining.

What ought to have been night of celebration turns sour for Grand National winning owner "Coates" (Nigel Patrick) when a contretemps with his drunken wife "Babs" (Moira Lister) leaves him the subject of a police investigation. The thing is - what really happened that night and can the pernickety "Insp. Ayling" (Michael Hordern) piece it all together? Lister features but sparingly, but her characterisation of "Babs" does rather get under your fingernails, so as the police work proceeded I did start to feel just a bit of sympathy for her rather idiotic, but good natured, husband - and Patrick is on decent form in that role here. It skips along nicely and engagingly for eighty minutes with a solid contribution from the usually reliable Noel Purcell and a soupçon of glamour from the underused Beatrice Campbell too. Maybe not his "latest and greatest screen role" as it said in the publicity blurb, but it's not a bad vehicle for a star who does enough here to keep it interesting, if not exactly intriguing with what must have been a fairly limited budget.

It's a big day for racing stables owner Nigel Patrick. His horse wins the Grand National, and his mare foals. Of course, his bored wife, Moira Lister, leaves him, and then returns to quarrel with him, and then her body is found next morning in a car in Liverpool, but these things tend to balance out. Of course, a very suspicious and ambitious Police Inspector Michael Hornden come by to quiz everyone, and it's clear enough what he thinks has happened. It's especially clear to the audience when Patrick insists Miss Lister never returned.

Even with that, there are a few surprises in this movie. It's been opened up from a stage play, and a good job of it has been done. Even so, the incredibly posh names, like Colin Gordon's upper-class twit "Babs Darling" and Patrick's sympathetic sister-in-law, "Pinkie Collins", portrayed by Betty Ann Davies, clutter the screen. With Noel Purcell and Gibbs McLaughlin.

A British film from 1953 starring Nigel Patrick as a racehorse owner and the beautiful Moira Lister as his wife Babs, this is a film about what happens after Gerald's (Mr. Patrick) horse wins the national. Babs, who doesn't seem to like horses much, parties in Liverpool without Gerald, thinks of divorce, drives home (without a license and probably a little impaired) and has a confrontation with her husband. A struggle occurs and she is killed. From there, the film becomes a detective story. This is where it gets more interesting, as the players in the film are questioned about certain aspects of their behavior. Not a long film (less than 80 minutes), it holds your interest from start to finish. Not essential, but a fairly good detective story/thriller.