Dilemma

Dilemma came on Channel 5 some time ago and I was pleased I taped it. It is quite an obscure movie.

A school teacher returns home from work and finds the dead body of a man in the bathroom. He doesn't know how it got there. His wife is missing as well, so there could be some connection here. He wraps the body with the shower curtain and takes it downstairs where he eventually digs up the floorboards in the living room. He keeps getting interrupted though, by a nosey neighbour, a blind piano tuner and a young boy who has come for his weekly piano lesson. He buries the corpse eventually and puts the floorboards back. His wife then arrives. What does she Know?

This is quite a good little movie and the nosey neighbour is a typical occurrence in the UK. There are some where I live. The piano tuner being blind is a little far fetched though.

Look out for Dilemma on TV listings. Not bad at all.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

Off-Beat Black Comedy that Plays Like an Episode of Boris Karloff's "Thriller" TV Show.

In Fact it Looks TV, Sounds TV, and Ultimately, Ironically that was the Format where the Brits had to Settle.

It was a Time when the British Film Industry was Phasing Out this Type of Thing,

with its Ultra-Low-Budget and Smallish Appeal on the Big-Screen.

So this Well-Written and Played Little Gem did Not get Distributed and Languished in Limbo for Years.

Above Average, Highly-Entertaining and Snappy Thriller.

It also Reminds of those "E. C." Pre-Code Comics that had Mothers and Senators in a Tizzy.

The Plot is "Hide-the-Body" Against All Odds.

Because the Living Room is Not the Ideal Graveyard.

Although it did Become One for Serial-Killer and Kids Party Clown John Wayne Gacy.

Remove the Floor-Boards, Add a Bag of Cement,

and Try to Avoid those Suburban Nuisances Like Nosy-Neighbors, Nuns with Collection Plates, Uninvited Doting Mom, and the Ever-Present Local Police.

The Door-Bell gets a Work-Out at just the Wrong Time and the Thing Escalates the Suspense and Frustration Factor for the One-Hour Running Time.

It Ends with a Twist, Fitting for 1962, the Era of the Dance-Craze.

This is Adult Entertainment for the Main-Stream.

This is a rather better than average B feature, set in a modest respectable middle-class '30s-'50s suburb of houses with tidy front gardens, net curtain and a nosy neighbour.

A bored middle-aged housewife notices some odd occurrences at her neighbours house - a scream, the sudden departure of the wife, the return of the husband, his curious activities throughout the day - carrying bags of cement indoors, carrying a large tin bath also indoors. All very suspicious. She consults her husband who knows her habits and reassuringly dismisses her concerns.

So far precisely an episode of One Foot in the Grave - the type of neighbourhood, bizarre happenings with very dark interpretations.

Only the dark events are not imagined but completely real - as the audience to this crime-mystery know in the first few minutes. The happenings are completely beyond the imaginings of the suspicious neighbour.

I didn't guess the final revelation. Although it is fairly engrossing, a better production would have ramped up the tension and made the wife's manner less even as the conclusion approached.

My lasting impression is that One Foot in the Grave, now an established comedy classic was a genius comic twist on this fairly ordinary original. Or perhaps I am just imagining it?

Coming to this film only eleven years (!) after Chris Gaskins' review, his comment "The piano tuner being blind is a little far fetched though" stirred a memory,so I looked online and saw that there is indeed an Association of Blind Piano Tuners. It may be an edition of QI that I am remembering, and I believe that Stephen Fry said that there is no authoritative figure of the number of UK piano tuners. My education is not solely derived from TV, I hasten to add.

Cheapo British B-picture which does not live up to its description. The initial premise is interesting enough, but any "thrills" are dissipated by the slack plotting. The "surprise" ending is signalled well before the end.