Escape Dangerous

This is an understandably obscure British film from 1947. It seems to be a one-shot production from its company, and its producer/director has no other credits on the Internet Movie Database. Its biggest player is yeoman character actress Marianne Stone as the flinching heroine; few of her other roles were given the dignity of a first and last name and most were bit parts.

As a movie, it's an interesting evolutionary step from earlier, lurid costume dramas like "Tower of London" and "The Man in Grey" to the Victorian-Era Horror movies that Hammer specialized in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, some of the behind-the-camera staff would wind up at Hammer within a couple of years.

Miss Stone and her father, Humberstone Wright, are a couple of French aristocrats seeking to escape the Terror of the French Revolution. While their passage to England is being arranged, they seek safety in a paying house, where their money is seemingly drained from them, and Beresford Egan, a scientist who keeps maundering on about science, pays a lot of creepy attention to Miss Stone. There are dark secrets that are revealed, of course, and things keeping getting more and more foreboding, until the end.

Unhappily, Mr. Egan is not a very engaging villain, and most of the players offer their performances in a very stagy manner. Between the obvious cheapness of the production and lack of anything to distinguish this picture, other than sheer creepiness, in an era when American horror movie monsters were busy meeting Abbott & Costello, this must not have pleased the post-war audience, looking for either some light relief or a sense of contemporary problems they could deal with. It sank with only the slightest of traces.