The Man in the Dock
Graham Greene here made an inauspicious entry into film writing converting a John Galsworthy story he himself considered "peculiarly unsuited to film adaptation" into "the worst and least successful of Korda's productions".
Olivier and Leigh, the gilded young lovers of the Old Vic, had yet to learn how to act before the cameras in this overwrought melodrama with a noisy score by John Greenwood which spent two years on the shelf before eventually slipping quietly into cinemas only after both leads had hit it big in Hollywood.
There are compensations, however, in the graceful work of it's Czech cameraman, some vivid shots of London as it looked in 1937, and above all a moving performance - twelfth in the cast list - by Hay Petrie, who Greene himself declared "enriches every picture in which he appears.
Olivier and Leigh, the gilded young lovers of the Old Vic, had yet to learn how to act before the cameras in this overwrought melodrama with a noisy score by John Greenwood which spent two years on the shelf before eventually slipping quietly into cinemas only after both leads had hit it big in Hollywood.
There are compensations, however, in the graceful work of it's Czech cameraman, some vivid shots of London as it looked in 1937, and above all a moving performance - twelfth in the cast list - by Hay Petrie, who Greene himself declared "enriches every picture in which he appears.
- richardchatten
- Nov 20, 2021