Mysterious Mr. Nicholson

This film was made by Ambassador films at their very small studios in Bushey which were operational till the 1970s.Rather ambitiously for a quota quickie it involves a man who has a villainous double.Most such films will have scenes where the two characters appear together and this is gone either in the camera or in an optical printer.in this instance it is done by not showing more than one of the characters at any moment in time or by the use of body doubles.Unfortunately Anthony Hulme has some difficulty in convincing us that he is two different characters.Most bizarrely of all the producers introduce a dog act right in the middle of the film.Not a very memorable effort.

An old geezer is writing his nephew out of his will, so lawyer George Bishop sends his secretary, Lesley Osmond, over to the house with the will. Just outside, she meets Anthony Hulme(playing Nicholson), who's coming from the house. He hurries on and she goes onto the house's grounds.... and finds a corpse. After the police are summoned, Hulme shows up at the lawyer's office, claiming to be a private detective. What is going on?

I don't really much care. The performances are loud and stagy, the score by Isaac Snoek is loud and random, and the camerawork by S.D. Onions is dark and dreary -- although that may be a problem of the print rather than the movie. The characters are underwritten, and although the two leads try to talk like human beings... well, that darned score keeps getting in the way.

The director, Oswld Mitchell, s not a name to conjure with. I couldn't recall anything else he had directed, although looking at his IMDb credits showed he was in charge of 31 movies from 1934 through 1949. Half a dozen of them were Old Mother Rileys. He died in 1949 at the age of 51.

This is a terribly wooden and rather dry affair that sees the police avail themselves of the services of a former petty burglar to track down the murderers of a millionaire. Anthony Hulme takes on a double role as both the goodie and the baddie - but comes nowhere near pulling it off convincingly from the audience perspective. The script is bland, and the photographer seems to have been content to leave much of the actor's heads out of shot! We stop near the end for an audition for 1940s "Britain's Got Talent" but aside from that it all rather demonstrates the weariness of the post-war UK in 1947.

An extraordinarily dull effort with stilted acting and boring dialogue..Except it all is elevated to stratospheric levels by introducing out of nowhere a brilliant stage dog act, and surely this was the greatest dog act the world has ever seen? Funny and charming little and big dogs doing all sorts of tricks and one little cheeky dog doing naughty things.. I looked for just the dog act, but it was nowhere to e found. Recommended only for the dogs. (Not for dogs to watch...you know what I mean..)

The budget for this quickie that makes a thirties quota picture look plush didn't even stretch to more than one brief process shot to justify the gimmick without which it would otherwise feel more like a radio play as the characters talk and talk in two-shots staged so badly they're fascinating.

Other writers have commented on the delightful dog act inserted halfway through; while Josie Bradley shows sass in the first of two film appearances tickling the keys over twenty years apart (the second being in 'Carry On Loving').