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The titular items are a moralist's elements of miniature order, "how very neat that looks!" Victorian Brighton is a strict home, the patriarch (Mervyn Johns) runs a pharmacy and insists on the inseparability of love and fear: "God is love, but we are taught to love him." Rebellion means a singing scholarship to one daughter (Jean Ireland) and poring over Jane Eyre and rescuing guinea pigs to another (Sally Ann Howes), to the son (Gordon Jackson) it means sneaking off to his first glass of whiskey at the local pub. The world outside the respectable household tingles with sordidness, the tavern owner's wife (Googie Withers) enjoys dalliance with scoundrels and scuffles with barflies. ("Most unladylike," snaps a wizened gossip prone to witchy cackling.) When the smitten lad gets her acquainted with medicinal poison, the proverbial light bulb goes off in her head in a sustained close-up next to a gas lamp. "After all, there is something about death that makes a difference." Ealing noir, Robert Hamer's first feature and already a model of darkening elegance. (Sirk's roughly concurrent Lured is a similarly erudite composition.) The father attends the trial of a murderess early on and memorizes the judge's verdict only to wield it against the femme fatale, the conventional happy ending is a news item dutifully dictated by the gazette editor. All the while Hamer remains fascinated by Withers' provocative amorality, saving his most expressive camera movement for her character's dazed walk through a crowd and off the edge of the pier. Lean builds on this most admirably in Madeleine. With Mary Merrall, John Carol, Catherine Lacey, Garry Marsh, Pauline Letts, Maudie Edwards, and Frederick Piper. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |