Inquest

Modest crime thriller held together by a winning performance from diminutive Hay Petrie, and enlivened by his clashes with excitable coroner Herbert Lomas.

Although short in duration this is distinctly a cut above a "quota quickie". Hay Petrie, who seems to have later been consigned to many small but distinctive supporting roles, here is centre stage in the court-room scene, gives a very spirited and dominating performance and makes the most of, for once for him, a very good role. Opposite him is a worthy foil both in terms of script and actor in the shape of (and here is a very rare thing) a comic Coroner with only too obvious human failings. The quotations in the opening credits questioning the purpose of a Coroner suggest that someone might have been grinding an axe in this intelligent and entertaining legal/crime-comedy.

A garrulous early production by Roy Boulting's company Charter Films, rather obviously based on a play.

Marking one of the last leading roles by the radiant young Elizabeth Allan in her only appearance in a Boulting's production, the cast already includes several regulars, some of whom, like Ian Wilson and Olive Sloane, were both still appearing for the brothers in the sixties (the latter already propping up a bar ten years before 'Seven Days to Noon').

The Boulting Brothers had a long and fairly distinguished career which stretched from the 30s into the 70s.They started,as did many technicians of that era in quota quickies.This film is a whodunit played out during the course of a Coroners Inquest. Herbert Lomas plays the rather tetchy coroner,who being wound up by the ever present police officer,wants to thwart the eager eyed barrister,played by Hay Petrie from taking the spotlight off of him.Eventually,mainly through the efforts of petrie we discover who killed the deceased the subject of the inquest.It does become rather convoluted and slightly difficult to follow.Elizabeth Allen maintains her silence almost to the end,which is rather unbelievable when her silence is likely to lead her straight to the Old Bailey.No better or worse than many similar films of the same genre.

'The office of Coroner is of great antiquity and no satisfactory account of its origin can be given.' Halsbury's "The Laws of England."

'It is even more difficult to give a satisfactory reason for its continuance.' 'English Justice.'

Those are the opening titles of this movie a mystery largely set at such a court produced and directed by the Boulting Brothers. A formerly rich man has died, and village gossip won't let his corpse lie easy. When the gun of his widow, Elizabeth Allan, turns up with an empty chamber, the body is exhumed, and the missing slug is found at the base of the corpse's spine.... and evidence of poisoning.

It's a tour de force for the Boultings in their efforts to make you dislike everyone. Miss Allan does everything she can to make you think she is guilty of.... well, if not of murder, of something. Herbert Lomas, as the pompous, bullying and out-of-control coroner makes you hope that he trips over his own feet and fails to convict her, and it's only Hay Petrie, in an uncharacteristically urbane role as her defense attorney, who bullies everyone, including his unwilling client, to stand between her and the hangman's noose.

It's based on a stage play by Michael Barringer and has clearly been opened up only minimally from what could have been presented in two acts on one set and a bit of lighting. However, its powerful performances by Petrie and Lomas make it transcend its cheap production value.