Death of an Angel

Made as a B movie but not too bad for a B movie. I found the sound to be very muffled so I had to watch it with the subtitles on. An interesting plot with a good twist but the acting was not very good. Not massively exciting or tension building as it just ran along so a bit boring to watch.

Not really worth making any great effort to find it on TV schedules as it's not very good at all. Interesting to see the old lady from the wonderful "The Ladykillers", the original not the later dire remake that I could only bear to watch for ten minutes as it was so very bad. It's on TPTV in the UK if anyone wants to see it.

Young doctor Raymond Young comes to the small town, where old doctor Patrick Barr offers him a partnership. But when Barr's wife, Jane Baxter, is found dead, the coppers take an interest in both men.

Charles Saunders direct an old-fashioned rural murder mystery, with young girls outwitting mad murderers, and a finale in a mill house, which doesn't bode well for some one. While it's certainly an adequate mystery, it looks like the actual murderer was chosen at random, and some clues written to point the finger of guilt at him. Still, always good to see Katie Johnson before THE LADYKILLERS made her a bit of a star.

"Death of an Angel" (1952) would have been a "B" feature supporting the main feature film when it was released in the early fifties.The first reviewer above exhaustively comments on the basic plot so I will confine mine to other matters.Of course no one who has seen "The Ladykillers" the Ealing (1951) comedy, can forget the old landlady played by the venerable Katie Johnson (1878-1957) who in this film plays a patient of Dr.Welling (Patrick Barr).The latter is known to me playing "Mutt" Summers who pilots the Halifax bomber in which Dr.Barnes Wallis (Sir Michael Redgrave) is testing out his new bouncing bomb idea as portrayed in "The Dam Busters" (1954).Raymond Young, Julie Somers & Jane Baxter are unknown to me in other notable roles who play Dr.Chris Boswell, Judy Welling and Mary Welling respectively.

the other notable actor was Russell Napier who plays the chief detective, a role Russell became used to playing in the 1950s.His most notable role for me was playing Captain Stanley Lord of "The Californian" in the 1958 film "A Night to Remember".All told a passable film which I had never seen and which I rated with 6/10.

Another early Hammer Studios film watched for the proper context on the "House of Hammer" podcast. "Death of an Angel" is another slow-moving melodrama, but the performances a reasonably good.

Dr. Chris Boswell (Raymond Young) accepts the position of partner in the small village practice of Robert Welling (Patrick Barr). When Doctor Welling's wife Mary (Jane Baxter) dies under suspicious circumstances and Welling himself disappears he becomes the prime suspect in the murder enquiry. Together with Nurse Ann Marlow (Jean Lodge) Doctor Boswell tries to convince the investigation Officer, Supt. Walshaw (Russell Napier) that Welling is not the murderer.

For a film that's little more than an hour long, it does take almost a third of its length to really get started. There are, admittedly several characters that need to be introduced in order for the story to work. The last two thirds are reasonably good though, with several reveals along the way, some of which you will probably anticipate and some that you might not. The story, honed on the stage only occasionally betrays that origin, with the film being largely set indoors and on a small number of rooms. Quite how the conclusion worked on stage is another matter.

Quite a lot of casual sexism, directed from Boswell at Nurse Marlow usually, which is actually unusual given how progressive Hammer were in some other areas. The fight, near the films, climax is a bit laughable by today's standards, but there's an interesting power of denial about the killer's confession. The ending, in comparison, to the opening is brief to the point of being abrupt.

I can't imagine that I'm going to revisit this one any time soon, but once the initial 20 minutes or so were done, it certainly held my interest through to its conclusion.