Man on the Cliff

In this twenty-three-minute short, Ronald Leigh-Hunt wakes on the cliff of a seaside resort with a corpse next to him and a case of amnesia. Thinking he may be a murder, he steals the corpse's identity paper and walks into town, where the papers are going on about a missing nuclear scientist.

It's a typical cheap production from sleazy producer E. J. Fancey. He wrote the screenplay from Maxwell Munden's short story, hired performers like his daughter Adrienne and the director's daughter, and had them shoot much of it wild, with Leigh-Hunt telling the story through its rather pointless ending through voice-over.

very early effort from Robert Hartford-Davis (Corruption, Incense for the Damned, The Fiend, etc), a man wakes up on a cliff, discovers he is suffering from amnesia and then finds a dead body nearby. Unable to work out whether he is the dead man's killer or the dead man's intended victim who fought back, he takes to walking about a nearby town where chatter and newspaper headlines about a missing nuclear scientist offers a clue to his identity.

The cliff setting and central murder scene that takes place there do point the way towards CORRUPTION, but overall the personality of its producer/writer EJ Fancey registers more here than that of Hartford-Davis (credited simply as 'R. Davis'). All of the usual Fancey hallmarks are present and correct, lots of inexpensive to film scenes of people talking on the phone and wandering about (giving the film some inadvertently strong time capsule qualities), plus a supporting role for offspring Adrienne Fancey (using her stage name Adrienne Scott) and a brief running time –its only 25 minutes long- so that EJ could stick it on the bottom of a double-bill and get his mitts on some Eady money.