"Icons of Suspense" Sony DVD
There's not many familiar Hammer names or faces (except for Jimmy Sangster on writing duties) associated with this rather typical thriller. The opening is pretty striking and does the job on suturing in the audience, but the rest of the film, while well made, is a pretty predictable cat-and-mouse affair. It's the story of a man (Peter Van Eyck) that may have possibly killed his wife's former husband. Her young daughter turns up when the woman is killed and says that she saw everything that happened to her father and believes the new husband also killed her mother. From there it is story of trying to convince the girl she is wrong while she fights to prove herself right. Technically there is no mystery here at all, the audience is in on everything from the start, but it's still a decent watch. The most interesting thing is that reportedly after the success of Psycho (1960), Sangster was asked to write several mysteries that were known at Hammer as the "mini-Hitchcocks", and while this film feels like it would have fit into that vein, it was made two years before Psycho was released.
6/10
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