The Dark Man

Poor old "Molly" (Natasha Parry) has the misfortune to witness the eponymous character commit double murder. He knows she knows, and she knows he knows that she does, and so now he (Maxwell Reed) is determined to shut her up before she can tell pursuing police inspector "Vine" (Edward Underdown) and he faces the gallows. There's no real jeopardy here - we all know who did what to whom, but it's still quite an engaging little cat and mouse thriller that, though it could certainly do with losing twenty minutes or so, has a strong supporting cast and some nice photography of England's Sussex coast as the adventure hots up to an exciting, if predictable, denouement. The acting and script are all pretty generic, but it's still worth a watch.

I noticed the weighted average user rating on IMDb.com for this film was only 5.6 and mainly voted for by males/females aged 45+.I thought it a cracking murder mystery and watching it tonight on YouTube.com and I voted 7/10.I had just started infants school when this was filmed in 1951 (I am now 65) but was attracted to it by seeing Edward Underdown in the cast list and seeing it was a wholly British film.The afore mentioned actor (1908-1989) played "Harry Chelm" in the cult John Huston 1953 film "Beat The Devil" playing the husband of my personal sex goddess film favourite, the late Jennifer Jones.

Like another reviewer I enjoyed seeing England as I remember it in my childhood.We too holidayed in Kent in the late 1940s/early 1950s.I particularly enjoyed seeing the almost complete absence of private cars and how one could park almost anywhere without seeing those wretched double yellow lines/no parking/"resident parking only" signs we see today.Maxwell Reed seems to be a favourite of the few reviewers above and I too have the DVD of him in "The Clouded Yellow" (1951) starring another of my raven haired favourite film actresses, the late Jean Simmons.

I was intrigued by the user comment that Edward Underdown (1908-1989) was much older than Natasha Parry who plays "the love interest" and indeed she is apparently still with us being born in 1930 and so was only 21 when this was filmed, while Edward was 43 during filming a sizable age difference.You rarely see detectives kissing the heroine on films of this age but Edward made a wry comment that "little detectives have to be born sometimes"!

Short but effective suspense thriller shot on England's south-east coast. Although we know the bad guy from the start, the suspense is nevertheless maintained until the final shoot out on the rifle ranges which provide an unusual setting. Accents & dialogues typical of 50s England. Definitely worth viewing !

A frequently incoherent but extremely well photographed drama in which tall dark Maxwell Reed, having demonstrated how ruthless a killer he is despatching his first two victims then makes a complete pig's ear of silencing Natasha Parry, who happened to be cycling past just after the second murder.

Many of the plot contrivances (including a very perfunctorily engineered romance between Miss Parry and the rather elderly looking detective played by Edward Underdown) and character vignettes by the likes of Barbara Murray and William Hartnell seem thrown in just as filler between cameraman Eric Cross's vivid noirish night scenes and enterprising use of the South Coast in bright sunshine to surprisingly sinister effect that anticipates 'And Soon the Darkness' nearly twenty years later.

Actress Natasha Parry is bicycling on the road when she hears a couple of shots, and sees a dark man emerge from the woods to stand by a standing auto. She thinks nothing of it, but in the dressing room that night, her fellow actress tells her the police are looking for witnesses. Miss Parry says she saw nothing useful, but her friend points out that it's always useful for an actress to get her name in the papers. Miss Parry reports the very little she knows to the police, and thinks that will be the end of it... until Superintendent of Police William Hartnell sees the item. With the unknown man having committed two murders, he thinks she's in for it, so he sends down Detective Inspector Edward Underdown to guard her, and possibly catch the dark man before he can kill her.

It's a handsomely shot movie, directed and written by Jeffrey Dell, with an intelligently plausible arc of action that ends in a chase across the seashore in the darkling. It's photographed in long takes by Eric Cross; the lengthening shadows convert a taut policier into a shadowy noir at the end.