Seven Sinners

The Launder/Gilliat screenplay credit attracted my attention, but other than its many screwball elements, the British comedy/thriller "Seven Sinners" came up empty.

I can imagine a Depression Era audience enjoyhing its modicum of thrills (re: train crashes) and the goofy situations and dialogue, but the show appear doomed from such weak casting. I doubt if current filmmakers would be interested in this genre at all, but from a few decades back, a pleasant hit like "Silver Streak" points up the necessity of finding the proper stars to populate such frivolous nonsense.

Beyond the dynamite first teaming of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, the SS supporting cast is a who's who of talented players. No such luck in this 1936 SS, with Edmund Lowe tiresome in his hogging the screen but offering zero charm, while Constance Cummings is eminently forgettable and the various minor players a washout.

Mildly amusing scenario of US private detective and female insurance investigator battling for supremacy in solving a series of murders in Europe. Will they kiss and make up in the end? The bad guys are suitably sinister and new ones keep popping up just when you thought you had it all figured out. The script writer must have been short on inspiration as the same device of a train wreck is used no less than three times. But those action sequences are well filmed and I'd swear one of the crashing steam locomotives is the real thing.

Although Arnold Ridley is synonymous with playing bumbling old Private Godfrey in DAD'S ARMY, in the 20s and 30s he was a reasonably successful playwright writing dashing adventure stories such as this.

This is a splendid, spiffing, old style rip-roaring mystery thriller very much in the Bulldog Drummond tradition of 'boys own adventures' which were so popular in the inter-war years. It seems like about half of all English plays, books and films featured a dashing slightly eccentric hero solving crimes or saving the honour of the Empire.

The dashing debonair hero in this however is neither that dashing nor that debonair nor indeed that heroic. He's prolific American B-movie actor, Edmund Lowe - very capable but was too inconspicuous to ever be a real star. Paired with fellow American 'also ran' Constance Cummings we've not got the classic eternal screen partnership but they do have enough chemistry to fully engage us.

They're no Bogart and Bacall but they're fine enough in these well written roles and being American makes this feel a little less provincial than some 30s English films but in this instance, it's not the stars which make you want to watch it, it's the story and the witty script - the first collaboration of the soon to be legendary partnership of Gilliat and Launder. The direction is also pretty snappy - Albert de Courville was clearly very, very heavily influenced by his more famous stablemate at Gaumont-British, Alfred Hitchcock.

It's also a very classy production - Gaumont-British were famously over optimistic in their bookkeeping so were prone to splash the cash at projects - even if they didn't quite have it! Not ideal for the future financial security of Isidore Ostrer's studio but good for us viewers, all these years later.

Ed Harwood, a wisecracking private investigator from New York, discovers a crime at an hotel in Nice during a carnival. The unraveling of the mystery which lies behind will lead him and Caryl Fenton, a female insurance agent, who will become his companion, first to Paris, then to London, later through the English countryside and finally to Southampton, in search of a criminal train wrecker.

Seven Sinners is entertaining comedy thriller in the vein of Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), featuring a couple who spend their time during their escapade bickering and bantering until, inevitably, they finally declare undying love. But that's only after some hectic and dangerous moments such as chases, train crashes and a shootout in a cinema-theatre at the end. There's some witty dialogue and likable performances from Lowe and Cummings,

American detective Edmund Lowe is traveling in Europe. He falls in with love interest Constance Cummings, and the two get tangled up in a mystery involving some train wrecks, a dead man, and a peace organization.

I was struck by the numerous plot elements and situations that Hitchcock had and would use. A comparison and listing of them would be the sort of thing that some one might undertake in search of, if not a thesis, then a good grade on a paper in a film course. Many of these similarities, I believe, can be attributed to the writers of this movie: Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder have the primary screenplay credits.

There's also a great train crash sequence lifted from the out-takes of 1929's The Wrecker. Over all it's a fine movie, even if it lacks the visual flair and mordant humor that Hitchcock would have given it.