The Traitor

A very wordy and stagey production that could almost have been a filmed stage play with no scene changes so confined is the action in the lounge of an (old dark) house. Central is late great British classical stage thesp Sir Donald Wolfit (the inspiration for the film "The Dresser") who as usual bigs up his part.

The premiss (German resistance fighters suffering betrayal to the Gestapo) did deserve superior plot and screenplay and it is regretable that this is something of a pot-boiler. The closing scene is stagey almost to the point of self-parody (indeed I believe subsequent comic parody versions have appeared). However the method by which the murderer is tricked into revealing himself at the end is perhaps worth sitting through the remainder on a rainy afternoon.