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"Nothing like taking a nice quiet bomb apart to steady the nerves." A drop of expressionism spikes the sober realism long before the nightmare scene, a traffic light canted and freeze-framed in the rain ("London, 1943"). Dismantling weapons is the specialty of the scientific brooder (David Farrar) with a prosthetic leg and a streak of pained bitterness, the new assignment involves booby-trapped explosives killing curious kids. "Found a dart and hit it with a hammer?" The back room where his crew works is a cellar tucked away in the military headquarters, buzzing with gifted eccentrics and managed by profit-minded bureaucrats, just the kind of indie unit appreciated by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. (The producers in this studio are Jack Hawkins as a "commercial stooge" and Robert Morley as a government ninny enchanted by a calculator.) Romance with the secretary (Kathleen Byron) keeps the self-pitying thirst at bay, nevertheless it explodes in a delirium of multiplying ticking clocks and ballooning whiskey bottles. "The barer the room, the better the work." Hawksian dynamics, noir shadows, the one-eyed Colonel Blimp (Leslie Banks) who was right all along. The hero perpetually on the verge of cracking sees an internal war shared with the lab assistant with domestic troubles (Cyril Cusack), "the fuse king" reduced to a depressed stammer. The jazz nightclub goes into Losey's The Sleeping Tiger, Lester in Help! recalls the cannon at Stonehenge. The great trial is the meticulous handling of a volatile cylinder sticking out of a peebly beachfront—a painstaking process scored to distant waves as the gravel shifts under the sweating protagonist. "Sorry. It was a personal matter." Aldrich (Ten Seconds to Hell) and Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) continue on the fatalistic detonation. With Michael Gough, Milton Rosmer, Emrys Jones, Walter Fitzgerald, Renée Asherson, Sidney James, and Anthony Bushell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |