Crown v. Stevens

Patric Knowles is a reliable lead in this quota quickie.Within a year he would be supporting Errol Flynn in The Charge Of The Light Brigade.Bernard Miles is appearing in his fourth film at the beginning of what would be an illustrious career on screen but primarily on stage.Mabel Poulton was a big star of the silent screen.However she had one problem and that was she had a cockney accent,Now whilst this was no hindrance to Michael Caine 30 years later,it was alas to poor Mabel.In those days it meant that you were going to end up playing supporting roles.In a parallel to John Gilbert she was handed a lucrative long term contract just before the end of the silent era and just like Gilbert her descent was equally rapid.This in fact was her penultimate film.After one more film her career in films ended.This film is a fairly conventional quota quickie with a rather pat ending.Always interesting but rather less than engrossing.

If you're looking for directorial distinctiveness (because the film was directed by the great Michael Powell), you'll be hard pressed to find much of it in this movie. Powell simply moves the story along deftly, managing the many dead ends and fresh starts in the plot so that they all seem quite natural. The plot itself is tepid by today's standards (and possibly also by the standards of the time). Certainly the shock value of a woman's role in the death of a moneylender is minimal. Some of the acting is a bit over-the-top, but when the characters appear at their most natural in their day-to-day working-stiff lives, they shine the most. Overall, as satisfying as the experience was, I couldn't give this film more than six stars.

As part of TCM's rolling out of films from Teddington, a small British studio, "Crown vs. Stevens," a 1936 film was shown.

These Teddington movies are done on the cheap, with poor production values, no names in the cast, and made very quickly. Nevertheless, the studio managed to pull them off with some good results here and there.

The very handsome Patric Knowles, who would soon come to Hollywood, plays a man taken advantage of by his fiancée - she takes off on him before he's paid for her ring, which she refuses to return.

His nasty cheapskate employer won't give him a raise or an advance, so he's forced to go to the seller to explain that he can't pay. He's promptly threatened with legal action if he doesn't show up with the money.

When he returns, sans money, he finds a woman has just killed the man and burned his books. It turns out to be his boss' wife, and she begs for his silence. He finds himself in a moral dilemma.

This movie held my interest and has a very satisfying denouement. We see so many B movies done in the U. S., why not some from Britain as well? Teddington isn't big on glamor and stars but seems to have tried for decent stories.

A clean little quota quickie which has some affinities to post war film noir. The femme fatale in this one is a bit more dreary than her noir sisters. The greatest affinity however that this film, and most of the other better quota quickies, is that they had straight ahead, no nonsense scripts, and a throw away sense of economics - no one really cared what the final product was as long as it was done for a price- and therefore no interference from producers and executives (who didn't exist at the time). The finished films were simply effective stories told in no nonsense fashion. Compared to today's films with their interminable lists of co-producers, executive producers and just plain producers, all of whom have massive insecurity and ego problems as well as overwhelming inferiority complexes, causing them all to have to put in various proprietary bits of business to show that they played an important part in the production of the film, the good quota quickie, like the film noir, works like a palate refresher.

Despite the somewhat misleading title of Crown VS Stevens (it's not a courtroom drama) the picture gets into the story from the start and marches off in a direct line to the denouement in a very satisfying way. Another similarity with the noir is the absence of star ego. Stories have not been manipulated because some big ego wants all of the good lines to do or have the double do acts of daring do etc. In fact in Crown VS. Stevens, a British Warner production, the lead actor Patric Knowles would be whisked off to Hollywood to appear as Errol Flynn's brother in Charge of the Light Brigade and begin a long career. In Crown Vs. Stevens what you see is what you get.

There are no twists or turns to the story, but there are various forking paths open to moral interpretation. Taken on this level there are layers upon layers of moral ambiguity, not the least of which is the identification with the crimes of Crime and Punishment, except in this film there is absolutely no guilt creeping into the consciousness of the femme fatale, the sociopathic element that was the hallmark of the noir. But that's getting a little too carried away and heaping too much significance on this amusing little film.

In London, Chris Jensen (Patric Knowles) puts a ring on his short-term girlfriend Mamie. He is barely able to afford it. His boss Arthur Stevens rejects his appeal for a raise. Mamie takes off with the ring. He owes money for the ring to unscrupulous lender Maurice Bayleck who threatens to go to the police. He later finds Bayleck dead and a woman holding a gun. She burns the debt book. Inspector Carter (Allan Jeayes) leads the investigation. It turns out that the woman is the wife of Chris' boss, Doris Stevens (Beatrix Thomson).

I really like the setup. The premise holds the promise of great tension. Along the way, the tension level rise slows. The movie could push the investigation a lot harder. While Doris deteriorates, Chris is too leisurely. It's their way of showing the good against the bad. There is a good crime drama here although the tension needs to be raised more.