The Franchise Affair

Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray (real life husband and wife for 60 years!) star in "The Franchise Affair" from 1951.

This film is based on a novel by Josephine Tey, which I read years ago and remember very well. The movie is a good adaptation.

The first scene shows a dishelved, bruised young woman, Betty Kane (Ann Stephens) who runs to her home in the dark after exiting a bus.

Denison plays Robert Blair, a British solicitor who is approached by Marion Sharpe, who lives with her mother (Marjorie Fielding) in a large house called The Franchise. The young woman is question is accusing Marion and her mother of holding her prisoner for several weeks and forcing her to work for them.

Betty had been visiting a relative and seems to have overstayed, but when her mother contacts the relative, Betty had already left. So where was she? And with whom?

Marion is fighting to remain calm, but it's terrifying. Betty knows all kinds of details about the grounds that she could not have seen from a bus, for instance, and describes the room where she was kept in perfect detail.

Though Blair doesn't take criminal cases, he's sympathetic toward the womens' plight and agrees to help. The women have to handle hate mail, hate phone calls, and rocks through their windows. Blair asks the local garage man for help, and he agrees to stay in the house.

Meanwhile, Blair is desperate to get some evidence against Betty Kane. He believes the Sharpes.

Very good movie with Kenneth More in a smaller role as the garage mechanic.

Very entertaining.

A reasonably faithful adaptation of Josephine Tey's 1948 novel based on an actual case of alleged kidnapping nearly two hundred years earlier; but also all too common unfortunately in the twenty-first century.

It begins rather like 'Kiss Me Deadly' with a flimsily dressed young woman thumbing a lift at night, while the mob violence unleashed against the two 'outsiders' recalls 'Le Corbeau'. But for the most part it's content to amble along without much sense of urgency as you scratch your head pondering over the 'why' rather than the 'what'?

A young girl reappears after a two week absence with a fantastic story of having been held captive by two women in an isolated house. The police seem disinclined to investigate deeply, so it is up to the women's lawyer to uncover the truth.

The movie is extraordinarily faithful to the book; indeed, entire pages of dialogue are transferred to the screen. The biggest change is in the nature of how the truth is disclosed, which is both tidier and more believable in the film.

The story is less a mystery than a character study, and in this the film falls flat. The most interesting character, the girl, is almost an aside. A section of the book that outlines her background and fills out her story has been dropped, and the film is poorer for that.

Still, you're likely to find it an intriguing film, if not one you'll rush to see again.

Small town solicitor Michael Denison is called in when two of his clients, Dulcie Gray and her aunt Marjorie fielding, are accused by Ann Stephens of kidnapping her and holding her at their estate to be a maid of all work. She describes the grounds and the room she was kept in, and an examination by the police show she knows the place. The village turns against the ladies, even as Denison develops feelings for Miss Gray.

Despite the derivation from a novel by Josephine Tey, I did not find this a particularly compelling movie. Things go from bad to worse, yet it only takes ten minutes in court to settle out what actually happened. Unprefigured witnesses pop up, with simple explanations of why they hadn't been heard from before. Despite a cast which includes Athene Seyler, Hy Hazell, and Patrick Troughton, there's nothing here but adequate performances in a poorly composed mystery.

I was drawn to this by its top-rank cast and I was glad that I stayed with it. It sets out its stall in the first 15/20 minutes and it it is one of those 'who do you beleive' type of thrillers. It dips somewhat in the middle (the Kenneth More character is entirely superfluous) but once it reaches the court scenes the satisfactory tying-up of its diverse plot lines is excellent and example of how these things should be done.