O Estrangulador de Brighton

During WW II as one of the Luftwafte air raids hits London, Reginald Parker, a successful actor, is knocked out and heavily concussed. Upon awaking he believes himself to be Edward Grey, the notorious Brighton Strangler he has been portraying on the stage!

Clocking in at just 67 minutes, The Brighton Strangler just about has enough time to get in and do it's job excellently. Something of an under seen gem, it's a film that has enough creepy menace about it to reward the black and white thriller fan. Boasting excellent sets, some very neat camera work from director Max Nosseck and a fabulous lead performance from John Loder, I personally feel that it deserves to be seen by more people. Typically it's a picture that rarely gets aired on British TV, and when it does it's sadly tucked away on BBC 2 at some ungodly hour in the AM. Until film's like this get decent exposure from our TV schedulers then they are going to remain criminally under seen. So keep your eyes out for this one, the formula may now be seen as old hat, but transport yourself back to 1945, out in the London smog and be wary of that hatted man coming towards you.........8/10

Readily do I admit my complete ignorance about German-born Director Max Nosseck. Certainly, you can detect touches of the famous German expressionist school in this film, and Loder too provides a quality expressionist performance, all backed up by splendid B&W cinematography from Roy Hunt.

It stands to reason that a 6/10 rating must perforce reflect a number of weaknesses, the screenplay being most obvious one. Though it opens with an interesting premise, that of a play becoming more real than life itself to actor Reginald Parker after suffering concussion in the wake of an air raid on London, I found it highly improbable that the main character had such a good memory of the play but not of the rest of his life, notably his relationship with his beloved.

An unusual finale with applause provides a clever conclusion but by no means reduces the viewer's need to suspend disbelief.

All told, it deserves a watch but not a rewatch. 6/10.

Though the film is sometimes hard to take, and had flimsy scenes, Loder is great as the actor overcome by shock, who becomes the character he was portraying on stage, a maniacal strangler! Certainly worth seeing on TV, since it does note seem available on video. And try to catch some of Nosseck's other flics, as he was in interesting german director, and handled noir well, especially with Lawrence Tierney.

It would require the labors of Hercules to spoil a movie that had June Duprez in a lead role. She's startling -- those chubby cheeks, that prominent mental symphysis, those slanted feline eyes, each looking in a slightly different direction, the breathlessly smooth voice. No. She's sui generis.

The movie isn't. It's one of several in which an actor is playing the role of a murderer on stage and gets mixed up about which role is which. Poor John Loder. He becomes amnesic after a bomb strike on his theater during the blitz, wanders around remembering nothing except bits and pieces of his stage role. It leads him to a meeting with June Duprez in Brighton where, following the play's plot, he strangles the mayor and the police commissioner. The last murder committed in the play is that of a woman who has begun to suspect him, and Duprez fits the bill in real life. Does he strangle her, you ask, kiddingly? If it's not entirely original, it's still a tidy little murder drama, nicely acted. Some comic relief is added by Michael St. Angel as an American officer -- "Gee whiz", "That cost twenty smackeroos," and"Okay, you can blow now."

RKO's great artistic team of Silvera and D'Agostino, along with stylish director Nosseck and photographer Hunt, lift the visuals to near artistic heights. Even when the story falters, the dream-like atmosphere carries the ball. It appears stage actor Parker's (Loder) head gets conked during a London air raid. Now he has trouble separating his strangler stage role from everyday reality. Needless to say, this causes problems for him and a couple of corpses he leaves behind. On the whole, Loder is excellent as the schizoid Parker. His generally low-key demeanor proves as disturbing as anything more florid. If there's a problem, it's with the script's treatment of the lovely April (Duprez), who seems impossibly naïve. Like when she goes to the dark roof with Parker even after some of his semi-loony behavior. Still, I love that amusing moment when the English maid tries politely to get her head around American slang.

I'm impressed with Nosseck's ability to coordinate a spotty narrative into an atmospheric whole. Looks to me like he's in the Edgar Ulmer (Detour, {1945}) category, working artfully and anonymously in Hollywood's lower rungs. His American career appears limited by mostly innocuous programmers-- unlike Brighton-- which may be why he went back to Germany. Nonetheless, he appears to have a real feel for this sort of Gothic material. Overall, the 60- some minutes is close to a sleeper, except for the spotty script. It also helps show why lowly RKO was the studio of record during the post-war 1940's.