Rex Harrison

Lilli Palmer

Tania Heald

Henrietta Barry

Dora Sevening

Ronald Simpson

Anthony Dawson

Brenda De Banzie

Ballard Berkeley

Raymond Huntley

William Squire

Denis O'Dea

Anthony Bushell

Henry B. Longhurst

Patricia Cutts

Meriel Forbes

Douglas Jefferies

Michael Medwin

Colin Gordon

Lionel Murton

Eric Pohlmann

Jenny Laird

Frank Tickle

Lilli Molnar

Jill Bennett

Fletcher Lightfoot

Anthony Shaw

Tom Macaulay

Richard Littledale

Tony Quinn

Ernest Blyth

Reginald Beck

Nunnally Johnson

Edgar Lustgarten

W.E. Fairchild

Peter Cusick

Adrian Pryce-Jones

Tom Simpson

John Glen

Iris Tilley

Betty Forster

Ronald Kinnoch

John O'Gorman

Kitty Spreckley

George Paterson

Elizabeth Hennings

Peter Price

Pat Wallace

Huntington Hartford

Wilkie Cooper

Eric Besche

Fred Turtle

Benjamin Frankel

Crime

Drama

The Long Dark Hall

Cusick International Films Inc.

Five Ocean Films Ltd.

United Kingdom

Circumstantial evidence old boy. Juries won't have it. They don't like it and they don't trust it. 

When Arthur Groome (Rex Harrison) finds his girlfriend murdered at her Earls Court flat and becomes stricken with grief and fear and promptly runs from the scene of the crime. Questioned by the police about the crime, Arthur, a married man, in panic denies all knowledge of the girl. Soon, however, he finds himself charged with murder and inexorably drawn towards the gallows...

Directed by Anthony Bushell and Reginald Beck, it is adapted to screenplay by Nunnally Johnson and William Fairchild from Edgar Lustgarten's novel. Harrison's real life wife at the time, Lilli Palmer, plays his loyal spouse here, while Benjamin Frankel scores the music and Wilkie Cooper is the cinematographer.

Largely ignored and underseen these days, due in the main that some critics of the time noted it has uncomfortable parallels to the real life Harrison and Carole Landis suicide affair - plus Harrison himself quickly denounced the film as dreadful - it's actually a decent wrong man court case picture often filmed in gorgeous film noir styles.

There is no mystery element here, for we know Arthur is innocent, and in fact we know who the killer is. We are given two murders in the first twenty minutes, each a year apart, the first is photographed on the outside in shadows, gaslights and upon a moist cobbled alleyway. The second, where the object of Arthur's lovelorn attention (Patricia Cutts) resides, is stifling in its cruel intensity. 

It's a sly story of obsession, circumstantial devilments, manipulation and somewhat oddly, loyalty. The suspense is ramped up as Arthur gets ever deeper in the mire during the court case (look how Cooper photographs the critical sequences in court), while his loving wife is being befriended by the real murderer (a wonderfully rat faced Anthony Dawson) who has his own distorted motives that he wants to bare out.

Viewing it now the police work due to the writing comes off as being very shoddy, and the finale is just a bit too much leftfield to wholly satisfy. Yet this is a very tidy Brit-Noir styled suspenser that comes recommended to fans of leading man and noirsh visuals. 7/10

English