80,000 Suspects

Officials in the City of Bath have to find "80,000 Suspects" in this 1963 film starring Richard Johnson, Claire Bloom, Yolande Donlan, and Cyril Cusack. Johnson is Steven Monks, an overworked doctor, and Bloom is his wife, Julie, an ex-nurse, who delay their vacation to fight a pending epidemic of smallpox. There is tension between the two; Monks had an affair with another doctor's wife, Ruth (Donlan), who becomes the subject of a search when it's learned that she was with someone infected with smallpox.

A very uninvolving movie that concentrates more on the relationship of the husband and wife than it does the tracking down of people who may have been infected with smallpox. That doesn't necessarily make it less interesting, but in this case, it's hard to warm up to the main characters. The lesser characters are actually far more likable and interesting - Michael Goodlife as Ruth's devastated husband and Basil Dignam as the worried chief medical officer.

There's not much in the way of raw emotion from either Johnson nor Bloom, both excellent actors but neither one particularly warm. The script calls for them to be very stoic.

Could have been compelling - isn't.

After a New Year's party, Dr. Steven Monks plans to head away on holidays with his wife Julie to patch up their weary marriage, but when later that night he diagnoses a patient of smallpox. Soon enough the city of Bath is facing an epidemic and Julie (who's an ex-nurse) wants to stay back and help out. The medical team led by Dr. Monks slowly starts to contain the outbreak after some early deaths and Julie being infected, but this leaves one case involving his colleague Dr. Clifford's runaway wife Ruth, who could be carrying the virus. What makes it harder for Monk, is that he had an secret affair with the lady, and this stressful situation has brought up the issue.

What looks like a crisp BW medical thriller on the surface turns out to be much more a melodramatic story centred on human interactions on a personal level. Where marriage is tested, adultery is looming and the smallpox epidemic is an interesting backdrop tool. This one is inspired off Elleston Trevor's novel "The Pillars of Midnight" and Val Guest would go on to direct and write the feature (which has dated considerably). Guest achieves a nice sense of realism with its workable semi-documentary touch, authentic locations and glum atmospheric air, but underneath that it never raises any intensity or urgency within the spreading outbreak and the personal side of the story lacks emotion and ends up pretty square. This makes way for a plodding pace and in the long run being a tad overlong. Guest's sedated, but standard handling in direction is competent and careful, but never entirely gripping and his material, while admirable never really clicks or takes off, like it could have done. It settles on a familiar and safe tone for most part. The talkative script is thickly verbose and strikes up few interesting character developments, but more often falls into many deadpan exchanges. The performances are acceptably durable, but better then the material they're given. Richard Johnson is rigidly ice-cold as Dr. Steven Monks and the stunning Claire Bloom impresses as Julie, but her classy turn is simply pulled back by the material. In able support roles is Michael Goodliffe, Cyril Cusack and an eccentric Yolande Donlan.

"80,000 Suspects" is stuffy and predictable, but in it stays watchable because of a solid looking production and some captivating, if not spectacular factors.

Guest shows himself as a competent all rounder (Wrote, Produced and Directed) but needs Bloom and Johnson to cover over direction which lacks at times. Bloom is given too little material for a pedigree which was demonstrated better both before and after, Johnson is archetypically stoic, if a little wooden. It is fair to say that it is dated, but still watchable, and the formula is true to what still makes a reasonable movie today. Emphasis is rightly on the characters and there are sufficient character subplots to keep us interested, though a little more development wouldn't have gone astray.

There are filmmaker who deserve further analysis, but who are forgotten for being artisans dedicated to genre films made with small budgets. However, some made a handful of films exceeding their limitations, and are better than overrated directors. Val Guest is one of them. Judging by his statements, he was a man of no pretensions who wanted to do his job well.

Born in London, Guest worked for many years with Gainsborough Pictures and Hammer Film, but he made movies through his production company. He put Hammer on the international map with «The Quatermass Experiment» (1955) and in 1961 his name was cemented with the sci-fi classic «The Day the Earth Caught Fire.»

Apart from works for Hammer, as the remarkable «The Abominable Snowman» (1957), or his participation in big productions as "Casino Royale" (1967), Guest remained in low-budget films, in which we sometimes discover his ability to enhance them and give the public good entertainment, often in black and white and wide-screen.

In this format, he produced and directed the drama «80,000 suspects», which presents a group in crisis, as in «The Day the Earth Caught Fire», but here there is no global alert, rather the alarm is limited to the city of Bath. Based on the novel «The Pillars of Midnight» by Trevor Dudley Smith, Guest recounts the drama of a smallpox epidemic that suddenly breaks out, causing numerous deaths during the collective struggle to control it.

The situations of the operation with health personnel, police officers and journalists are handled at a good pace and efficiently, even with a couple of image transitions planned on set, with very good use of the CinemaScope format, as he did on other occasions. The theme of adultery between doctors and wives, plus the participation of a priest, do not obstruct the drama of the epidemic, but are revealed as key elements of the story, although the dialogues slow down the plot, by today's dramatic standards.

All in all, Val Guest's «80,000 suspects» is a good contribution to the British film industry of those years, in which he combined current issues (smallpox killed about 300 million people in the 20th century), the ethics of life in couple, and the good effect that religion can have on people's lives, instead of bothering them with old-fashioned and obscurantist notions.

(*) Now I realize that, with «The Day the Earth Caught Fire,» Guest and his collaborators anticipated the current alarming global warming; and «80,000 suspects» describes a situation similar to the covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

Nice to see the city of Bath used for location filming, and in the one of the coldest winters the UK had seen in 1963! The snow was definitely authentic. The Abbey and Pump Rooms used to good effect but wasn't parking easier then?! Otherwise, a bit of a pot boiler with a stilted script and over dramatic storyline but Claire Bloom and Richard Johnson looked lovely and sexy in the snow.