The Franchise Affair

Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray (real life husband and wife for 60 years!) star in "The Franchise Affair" from 1951.

This film is based on a novel by Josephine Tey, which I read years ago and remember very well. The movie is a good adaptation.

The first scene shows a dishelved, bruised young woman, Betty Kane (Ann Stephens) who runs to her home in the dark after exiting a bus.

Denison plays Robert Blair, a British solicitor who is approached by Marion Sharpe, who lives with her mother (Marjorie Fielding) in a large house called The Franchise. The young woman is question is accusing Marion and her mother of holding her prisoner for several weeks and forcing her to work for them.

Betty had been visiting a relative and seems to have overstayed, but when her mother contacts the relative, Betty had already left. So where was she? And with whom?

Marion is fighting to remain calm, but it's terrifying. Betty knows all kinds of details about the grounds that she could not have seen from a bus, for instance, and describes the room where she was kept in perfect detail.

Though Blair doesn't take criminal cases, he's sympathetic toward the womens' plight and agrees to help. The women have to handle hate mail, hate phone calls, and rocks through their windows. Blair asks the local garage man for help, and he agrees to stay in the house.

Meanwhile, Blair is desperate to get some evidence against Betty Kane. He believes the Sharpes.

Very good movie with Kenneth More in a smaller role as the garage mechanic.

Very entertaining.

I was drawn to this by its top-rank cast and I was glad that I stayed with it. It sets out its stall in the first 15/20 minutes and it it is one of those 'who do you beleive' type of thrillers. It dips somewhat in the middle (the Kenneth More character is entirely superfluous) but once it reaches the court scenes the satisfactory tying-up of its diverse plot lines is excellent and example of how these things should be done.

The film sticks closely to the book, which is a plus. It was made soon after the war, and some of the events recall what people had been through - being demonised and having mobs graffiti your premises and throw rocks through your window, and worse.

The acting is fine, especially from old Mrs Sharp. The makers avoided the temptation to have the other characters comment on her saltiness - she just comes out with her rather acid quips. She is funny, and so is Michael Deniston as Robert Blair, the solicitor.

I agree with the commenter who regretted the static nature of the filming - yes, it is stagey. Characters don't move much, and there are few close-ups or reaction shots.

The working-class characters are more prominent in the book, but they are well-played by such as Kenneth More and Patrick Troughton.

40s films gained by the glamour and style of women's clothes and hairdos. What went so wrong in the 50s!?!? Betty Kane is supposed to look frumpy in her school clothes, but poor Dulcie Gray is saddled with middle-aged clothes and a hair-don't.

Saw this yesterday for the first time.... started watching casually, but was soon drawn into the plot. Thought the direction was spot on , and the tension was ramped up wonderfully.

Yes the dialogue was a tad clipped, but it was 1951 for goodness sake, but I thought the script was bang on , with some wonderful cameos( apart from Kenneth Moore, as said elsewhere on here who's role was superfluous)

This film was a real gem, and would recommend it to anyone.

A reasonably faithful adaptation of Josephine Tey's 1948 novel based on an actual case of alleged kidnapping nearly two hundred years earlier; but also all too common unfortunately in the twenty-first century.

It begins rather like 'Kiss Me Deadly' with a flimsily dressed young woman thumbing a lift at night, while the mob violence unleashed against the two 'outsiders' recalls 'Le Corbeau'. But for the most part it's content to amble along without much sense of urgency as you scratch your head pondering over the 'why' rather than the 'what'?