Whispering Smith Hits London

Richard Carlson is the parachuted in American actor,with the mysterious name of whispering,mainly for the benefit of the RKO release in America.Lots of familiar faces cant inject life into this torpid thriller.The action only starts in the last 20minutes.Greta Gynt is glamorous and Herbert Lom is not to be taken at face value.Bray and its studio very much in evidence.

Fast and good a British "Laura"- despite a curious sexual ambiguity. One of the best British B thrillers. Not quite as good as 'The House Across The Lake' - but that was the best!

Steve "Whispering" Smith as played by Richard Carlson is a well-known American Private Eye in London for a holiday. His jaunt to Cornwall is cut short when Greta Gynt asks him to investigate the death of her employer's daughter. It's supposed to have been a suicide, but she doesn't believe it. Carlson's investigation leads him into a web of blackmail and murder.

I've no idea why Carlson's character is called Whispering Smith. Originally he was a railroad detective in the 19th Century in a book by Frank Spearman. It became a movie in 1916 with J. P. McGowan in the title role. In the remakes and sequels, the role was taken by McGowan again, then George O'Brien, and in 1948, by Alan Ladd; it would later become a TV series starring Audie Murphy. In all of them, Smith is a character in the Old West. Here, Carlson plays him as a modern man in the archetypal detective's trench coat.

It's a pretty good mystery, with an interesting cast, including Herbert Lom, Rona Anderson, Alan Wheatley, and Stanley Baker in a tiny role. With occasional hints of noirish lighting and, eventually, a femme fatale, it winds up being a typical detective movie, in which everything is set aright by the capture of the murderer.... despite the fact that none of the murder victims come back.

Richard Carlson was always an enjoyable figure on the screen, always efficient, intelligent, with a lot of ironic humour and splendid directness, with a very expressive face, and to his acting comes here a splendid script with wonderful complications and turnings to the unexpected, which even Richard Carlson has some difficulty in following in the beginning, but eventually he catches up. Partnering him are two ladies of very different kind, Roman Anderson as a cheeky assistant almost importuning into his intimacy, and Greta Gynt, the double beauty of very doubtful intentions and unfathomable secrets. The mystery here is all about a third woman who is dead by suicide, according to the coroner's report, but there is something very fishy about her death, so when "Whispering Smith" comes to town he is immediately hooked to investigate the case. Although the police is quite satisfied with the coroner's report, there was no motive for her suicide, while at the same time no one seems to have had any motive for doing her in. In brief, nothing fits, and "Whispering Smith" finds himself enmeshed in a hopeless case of no way out and only black holes. Gradually it appears that the deceased woman was not altogether agreeable, there were two sides to her character, and everyone involved with her, Herbert Lom for one, Reginald Beckwith for another, her lawyer, all deeply in love with her, had some blackmail racketeering in common. Eventually Richard Carlson clears the case, in which nothing was anything else than fake, and we shall never know what the murdered woman really looked like.

Just like its lead character, an American detective vacationing and solving a murder case in London, "Whispering Smith Hits London" is a film caught in limbo, somewhere between an American film noir and a British "cozy" mystery. There is a big plot twist that will be rather obvious to genre fans (the minute you hear about an "unrecogizable body", you immediately get suspicious....), but overall it's an interesting little movie. Whispering Smith himself is a pretty nondescript hero, but there are a couple of very good supporting performances by Herbert Lom and Greta Gynt; both Gynt and Rona Anderson are stunningly beautiful. **1/2 out of 4.