Delitto per procura

This is a little British murder mystery, not a noir. The main character is a nice shlub, not a tough guy. There is very little tension or menace and certainly not any cynicism or existential despair. The dialog and bits of business are pretty funny and practically everyone in the film, including the villain, seems basically likable. Dane Clark does a very good job, although he will go on to do better. The plot offers a steady diet of red herring, but plot is not this film's strong suit. The whole thing is so likable that you may find yourself cringing that the plot and twists and turns seem so aimless and gratuitous, but it doesn't pretend to be more than a grade B movie with some good acting and good dialog.

As was common in the fifties, a jobbing American B-lister was brought over to add a bit of box office to a mid-budget British crime thriller. This time it was Dane Clark who portrays the down at heel "Morrow". In a bar he meets the glamorous "Phyllis Brunner" (Belinda Lee) who gets him a bit drunk then offers him £500 to marry her. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he acquiesces to this perfectly reasonable demand from a women he had known for four hours (?!) but gets quite a shock when he wakes up next day, somewhat thick headed, in an artist's studio covered in blood. Whose blood? It does not take him long to discover that his brand new father-in-law was murdered less that 12 hours earlier and that he is the prime suspect. Can he fathom out what happened before the police hear - and obviously don't believe - his story? Clark is actually not bad, here, but the plot is far too unnecessarily complicated - it could easily trip over it's own cloak and stab itself with it's own dagger - and that rather robs it of any punch. It's also really quite slow, too - quite a few scenes that add little and further decelerate the story. Not bad, but too long and never something you will remember watching.

This is a Kit Parker/Hammer Film starring Dane Clark, Belinda Lee. Eleanor Summerfield, and Harold Lang.

Clark plays Casey Morrow, an American in England. One night he meets a beautiful blond named Phyllis (Lee) and she offers him a job for a big amount of money. All he has to do is marry her.

The next day, he can't remember a thing except meeting her. He's in a strange place with a a woman he doesn't know, and there's blood on his coat. It's the painter's studio of a friend of Phyllis' (Summerfield). Morrow sees in the paper that his new wife's father was murdered the night before.

Did he do it? Did Phyllis set him up? And where is Phyllis? This is an okay noirish film that has some humor in it as well as drama. Clark is very good as a confused man trying to make his way through a labyrinth of lies and people. The plot is a little all over the place and not that easy to follow.

Clark was supposed to be another John Garfield, but his career went in another direction. He was very successful in television, appearing as a regular or semi-regular in many series and guest-starring on many TV shows.

Belinda Lee unfortunately died in a car accident in the U. S. when she was 25. In this film, she is around 19 years of age and very beautiful, touted as a Diana Dors-type. A sad end.

While interesting for the footage of London circa 1954, this is an absurd movie. The story line is almost impossible to follow. There's almost no dramatic tension. The situations and supposed relationships are so unrealistic that even willing suspension of disbelief doesn't work. The protagonist is gullible and hard to swallow as a supposed tough guy when he spends so much time playing the fool to beautiful women and whimpering like a small boy to his mother, etc. And to top it off, it really doesn't strike me as a film noir at all, just a confusing murder mystery. The best thing about it is Belinda Lee, previously unknown to me, a beautiful woman who was killed a few years later, at 26, in a California car accident.

The film begins with Dane Clark being offered a strange marriage proposal from a woman he just met. Not only that, she offers this drunk guy 500 pounds to do the deed! However, upon waking up the next morning, he finds he's implicated with murder and there's no trace of the lady! So, it's up to tough-guy Clark to investigate and clear his name.

Most fans of Film Noir will be surprised to hear that the British (not to mention, the French) made quite a few of these in the 1950s. Oddly, the Brit Noir films were made by Hammer Studios--the same folks who made tons of Dracula, Frankenstein and Mummy films from the late 50s to the mid 1970s! And, oddly, this film is directed by the studio's foremost monster film director, Terence Fisher.

Overall, while this is far from a great film, it does stack up pretty well with the average American example, though I will admit that this film does have a few too many twists and turns (particularly for the character of Phyllis Brunner).