L'assassin frappe à minuit

When Arthur Groome (Rex Harrison) finds his girlfriend murdered at her Earls Court flat and becomes stricken with grief and fear, he promptly runs from the scene of the crime. Questioned by the police about the crime, Arthur, a married man, in panic denies all knowledge of the girl. Soon, however, he finds himself charged with murder and inexorably drawn towards the gallows...

Directed by Anthony Bushell and Reginald Beck, it is adapted to screenplay by Nunnally Johnson and William Fairchild from Edgar Lustgarten's novel. Harrison's real life wife at the time, Lilli Palmer, plays his loyal spouse here, while Benjamin Frankel scores the music and Wilkie Cooper is the cinematographer.

Largely ignored and underseen these days, due in the main that some critics of the time noted it has uncomfortable parallels to the real life Harrison and Carole Landis suicide affair - plus Harrison himself quickly denounced the film as dreadful - it's actually a decent wrong man court case picture often filmed in gorgeous film noir styles.

There is no mystery element here, for we know Arthur is innocent, and in fact we know who the killer is. We are given two murders in the first twenty minutes, each a year apart, the first is photographed on the outside in shadows, gaslights and upon a moist cobbled alleyway. The second, where the object of Arthur's lovelorn attention (Patricia Cutts) resides, is stifling in its cruel intensity.

It's a sly story of obsession, circumstantial devilments, manipulation and somewhat oddly, loyalty. The suspense is ramped up as Arthur gets ever deeper in the mire during the court case (look how Cooper photographs the critical sequences in court), while his loving wife is being befriended by the real murderer (a wonderfully rat faced Anthony Dawson) who has his own distorted motives that he wants to bare out.

Viewing it now the police work due to the writing comes off as being very shoddy, and the finale is just a bit too much leftfield to wholly satisfy. Yet this is a very tidy Brit-Noir styled suspenser that comes recommended to fans of leading man and noirish visuals. 7/10

The plot is not original...Mistress is Murdered,Married Man accussed...Wife stands by him. But Sir Rex Harrison makes you believe in the story. Harrison gives an extremely fine and brilliant performance which raises the film from a typical pot boiler into the story of a regretful innocent man. Lily Palmer (at the time..Mrs. Harrison) is also in fine form as his on screen wife.

Rex Harrison stars as Arthur Groom, a man on trial for murdering a stage girl. This girl was young and became an obsession of Groom. The timeline becomes very critical as Groom claims that he spoke to a "large Italian man" at 10:00pm, the very time when the girl was murdered. All the circumstantial evidence such as the knife, seen there, lied about being in neighborhood and knowing the girl. No one can find his alibi. Trouble is as Groom tells everyone on the witness stand "I'm telling the truth but no one believes me, trouble is that it doesn't sound true, what good is the truth when it doesn't sound true." Lilli Palmer is Mary Groome, his faithful wife that stands with Arthur but will her marriage vow of "until death" be tested.

Wow--talk about divergent reviews. Two apparently hated the film (giving it a score of 2) and two liked it very much (giving it a score of 7). I think my opinion is somewhat in the middle--though I think giving the film a 2 is awfully silly. It's NOT a bad film, though I would agree with goldbug-2 that the forensic work done by the police seems sloppy. In fact, up until late in the film, I could look past the problems with the knife and other evidence. However, the completely unbelievable ending and the major mistake in the film concerning the witness they could not locate made me mad--as it just looked sloppy and the film seemed to be wrapped up too quickly. Let me explain the problem with both. Rex Harrison's character insisted there was a witness that could place him at the restaurant and later you see this witness come to court but then walk away without giving evidence. How could this be? The film was told to an author by a newspaper man but how could the newspaper man tell that the witness DID come to court but then ran away without telling anyone--how could he have known this?! As for the ending, the film maintained a rather steady pace throughout but at the end, everything was basically described to the audience--neatly wrapping everything up but not even showing what they were describing! It was like they decided not to film the last 20 minutes of the movie and just sum it up in 5!! Sloppy indeed.

It's all rather sad, as up until then, the film was well written, acted and kept my attention. Sadly, I was anticipating giving the film a 7--but the sloppy ending really brought the film down to the level of mediocrity. Too bad.

By the way, I rarely directly complain about an other review, but the one reviewer that complained ad nauseum about the 1950s really needs to stick to the film itself and not give us a diatribe about sexism and repression. You can't so strongly attack one film because you have such strong contempt for the 1950s! Who cares what you think about the 1950s? While I do agree that Lilli Palmer played a woman with very low self-esteem (considering how much she excused her womanizing husband), such vehemence about the film is just bizarre. Her character might have justified giving the film a somewhat lower score, but not this low.

Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer star in the British "The Long Dark Hall," from 1951.

Harrison plays Arthur Groome, who stands trial for the murder of a showgirl, played by Patricia Wayne. Actually, the person who did it is a man who has killed before (Anthony Dawson), which we see in the beginning. However, thanks to some circumstantial evidence, Groome, who was involved with Rose, stands accused.

His wife Mary (Palmer) knows he couldn't have killed the woman, no matter what, and stands by him.

This evidently was an attempt to cash in on the suicide of Carole Landis in 1948. As the story goes, Harrison, who was married to Palmer at the time, refused to divorce her and marry Landis, which is said to have driven Landis to suicide. She left two suicide notes, one of which was for Harrison, and Harrison destroyed it and claimed he knew no reason for her suicide. This was long ago, and I imagine many stories have sprung up and been embellished, so it's hard to know what happened. It is known that Landis knew by 1948 that she wasn't going to have the career she wanted; she was 29, and by the time you were a female aged 30 in Hollywood, you were done playing the kind of role she did. Palmer stood by Harrison during the scandal and attended Landis' funeral with him.

Now, why these two would have agreed to do this film is beyond even my wild imagination, except both of them might have been trying to prove something.

It's an okay movie with one problem. We are taken through the criminal's first murder and his murder of Rose; the arrest of Arthur; the trial; the testimony; his alibi witness guilty for not coming forward; the verdict. And then, one minute before the film ends, we are told the whole rest of the story. It seemed a little abrupt to me, as if the money ran out or something.

The acting is very good, Harrison a great pro and Palmer, lovely and elegant. Though she and Harrison did not divorce until 1956, she left him in 1954 and made films in her native Germany, though she continued to make American films.