British screenwriting husband and wife team, Sidney and Muriel Box, won the Oscar in 1946 for the 1945 drama The Seventh Veil and were quickly picked up by the Rank Organization to head up the Gainsborough Studio, one of its smaller off-shoots. With Sidney’s sister, Betty Box, one of the most powerful producers in Britain, and the top producer at Gainsborough, it wasn’t long before they got busy putting out the kind of movies they liked over the movies the studio was known for at the time, the Gainsborough Melodramas. One of their earliest successes was the 1947 suspense thriller Dear Murderer, a taut little story of jealousy and revenge that holds up well after almost seventy years.
PLOT SPOILERS BEGIN
Dear Murderer opens with Lee (Eric Portman) returning home to England from America only to discover love letters in his bedroom to his wife from a man named Richard Fenton (Dennis Price), her presumed lover. Jealous and angry, he looks up Richard’s address and heads over to his flat. Once there, he introduces himself to the uneasy and cautious Richard who, nonetheless, offers him hospitality and a drink. Lee tells him he wants Richard to write a letter to his wife, Vivien (yes, their names are Vivien and Lee. In-joke? Who can say?) telling her that the affair is over because he, Richard, realizes now that Vivien loves her husband and always will. It may be cowardly, Lee has Richard write, but he, Richard, is going to leave the country.
Satisfied, Lee takes a sip of his drink only to knock it over on the letter and asks Richard to write it again. Richard begins but just after he writes that he’s going to take the cowardly way out, and before writing that he’s leaving the country, Lee pulls out a gun and forces Richard to stop. Now it looks like a suicide note and, indeed, Lee informs Richard that he’s going to kill him and make his death look like a suicide. How he does this I will leave for those who want to give the movie a look because it’s rather inventive and would probably work, at least in the days before detailed forensic science.
In the midst of Lee’s brilliant murder plan, Vivien shows up at Richard’s flat with yet another lover (she’s been quite busy while he was away in America), thinking Richard’s flat is empty. This leads Lee to abandon his plans for setting up Richard’s death to look like a suicide and instead, again rather ingeniously, decides to make it look like the new lover, Jimmy Martin (Maxwell Reed), set up the suicide of the old lover and proceeds to put in place everything that needs to happen to frame Jimmy for Richard’s murder.
PLOT SPOILERS END
Even though I revealed a bit of the plot there, that’s only about 10% of what happens in the movie. Plans unravel, new tacks are taken, and the cold hearts of both Lee and Vivien are exposed. Vivien is particularly cold and humorously self-centered, even taking visible delight when told that her lover, Richard, committed suicide because he couldn’t be with her. She smiles, filled with self-satisfaction, and whispers happily, “He killed himself for me.” Vivien, the best character in the movie, is a delight to watch. From her flashback scenes with Lee before he goes to America where she promises him she won’t have any more affairs (“Paul? That was just a silly lapse.”) to her refusal to give a damn when Lee is doing his best to destroy her for cheating on him (she moves out, briefly, leaving him a letter addressed “Dear Murderer” and says she won’t stick around and suffer for his enjoyment). She knows how to get what she wants and does a pretty good job of rivaling the best (or is that worst?) femme fatales seen on the other side of the Atlantic. All credit due to the statuesque and lovely Greta Gynt for making Vivien such a beguiling character. Her career never really took off and her most famous role remains the 1939 Bela Lugosi movie The Dark Eyes of London (aka, The Human Monster).
Eric Portman does an excellent job in the role of Lee although he, unfortunately, became most famous, or should I say infamous, for his rather narrow minded views of the world. There was even a play written about him and his anti-Semitic views, Dinner with Ribbentrop, by a former personal assistant. He was a fine actor but the less said about him as a person, the better.
Classic movie fans will also be pleased to see Dennis Price in the role of Richard. Price, known for his lead role in the brilliant comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets, shines in his small role here. He plays indifferent, indignant, and, finally, terrified, quite well in such a short span of time.
Hazel Court, famous for so many great horror films for both Hammer and Roger Corman, is here as well, in one of earliest movies, playing Richard’s sister, Avis. Court has been a long time favorite of mine and it’s always good to see her in early works before she became the Hammer star the world fell in love with. It’s also a mystery to me, always, how she never became a bigger mainstream star.
Finally, Jack Warner (no, not that one) plays Inspector Pembury who immediately suspects the stories he’s hearing about Richard’s suicide are all too conveniently neat and tidy. In many ways, it plays out like a Columbo episode since there is no mystery in who kills who and how. The audience sees it all happen right at the beginning and then watches the inspector piece it all together.
Dear Murderer is another fine example of good film noir done outside of Hollywood in the forties that doesn’t have the name Carol Reed attached (as Odd Man Out and The Third Man are often the main examples one cites of such things). It’s tight and tense and entertaining from start to finish. It didn’t win the Boxes another Oscar but, in the end, it just may be their best work and well worth a look.