Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray (real life husband and wife for 60 years!) star in "The Franchise Affair" from 1951.
This film is based on a novel by Josephine Tey, which I read years ago and remember very well. The movie is a good adaptation.
The first scene shows a dishelved, bruised young woman, Betty Kane (Ann Stephens) who runs to her home in the dark after exiting a bus.
Denison plays Robert Blair, a British solicitor who is approached by Marion Sharpe, who lives with her mother (Marjorie Fielding) in a large house called The Franchise. The young woman is question is accusing Marion and her mother of holding her prisoner for several weeks and forcing her to work for them.
Betty had been visiting a relative and seems to have overstayed, but when her mother contacts the relative, Betty had already left. So where was she? And with whom?
Marion is fighting to remain calm, but it's terrifying. Betty knows all kinds of details about the grounds that she could not have seen from a bus, for instance, and describes the room where she was kept in perfect detail.
Though Blair doesn't take criminal cases, he's sympathetic toward the womens' plight and agrees to help. The women have to handle hate mail, hate phone calls, and rocks through their windows. Blair asks the local garage man for help, and he agrees to stay in the house.
Meanwhile, Blair is desperate to get some evidence against Betty Kane. He believes the Sharpes.
Very good movie with Kenneth More in a smaller role as the garage mechanic.
Very entertaining.
