Review of Web of Evidence

A.J.Cronin has made a great novel out of some very difficult traumas, as an American comes home to Liverpool, where he was born, and finds his father in prison for life. Van Johnson as the son came home just to finally get to know something of what really happened to his father, and he immediately gets immersed in a mess of complications and worries. After recovery from the shock of finding his father having escaped hanging by a hair's breath, he gradually is more certainly convinced that his father was innocent, framed and sacrificed for other people's crimes, but his boat is sailing back to America in four days, and he has to be on it, which the local police superintendent is especially keen to make sure that he is. Naturally he stays to investigate the matter further. Jack Cardiff who directed this complicated film did not direct many films, but he was one of the most important cinematographers off British cinema and was the director of photography for all the major Powell-Pressburger films and also of "The Magic Box" among many others. This is not a film to appeal to the great multitude and make a big box office success, but it falls into a more singular kind of category of "human noirs" like all the early films of John and Roy Boulting. The acting though is superb, and when you see and enjoy Vera Miles as Lena in this very poignant drama you understand why Hitchcock wanted her for "Vertigo". She makes the deepest impression, Van Johnson is himself as usual as the perfect candidate for a tragic character, and as the old tragic lawyer who saved the victim's life from hanging, you find the old veteran Emlyn Williams in a very sensitive role. Bernard Lee as the father who almost gets hanged for nothing also provides perhaps the only shocking role of the film, as you first get to know him playing in the park jovially with his son and then after twenty years in prison, which life has made his character almost completely unrecognisable, - and yet the son finds him again, and this is the golden moment of truth of the book and the film.