Murder Without Crime (1951)

Dennis Price is a landlord by necessity, that is, he is forced to rent out rooms in his West End mansion and has a bickering couple (Derek Farr and Patricia Plunkett) upstairs. They are having an argument and she decides to leave him. After she leaves, he decides to drown his sorrows at a nearby bar where he meets Grena (Joan Dowling), a tart who lives on the same block.Back at her place and very drunk, he decides he'd rather just go home, which infuriates her. She ends up following him home and they have a loud argument which turns physical and which Price downstairs can hear. Plunkett changes her mind and calls home in the middle of the mayhem. Grena has been killed.What ensues is a cat-and-mouse game as Price enters the gargoyle-filled apartment, guesses what has happened, and decides to blackmail Farr.Excellent thriller with more than a few surprises in the plot. The four actors are all excellent with Price and Dowling taking top honors. Also of note are the incredibly ugly Victorian apartment and lighting that creates a room of monstrous shadows and shapes.The opening and closing narration is a little weird, but don't let it put you off this tidy thriller.

Derek Farr and his wife Patricia Plunkett are having another fight after Farr comes back home from another one of his flings. Plunkett decides enough is enough and leaves him. Farr ends up getting drunk in a nightclub with their landlord Dennis Price, who leaves for home again soon after. But not after introducing Farr to hostess Joan Dowling, and he ends up driving her home. One thing leads to another and they end up in Farr's apartment. Plunkett in the meantime has cooled down and calls home, to say she's coming back. Dowling overhears it and there is another fight, with Farr pushing Dowling away who hits her head on a table. Farr panics and shoves her body inside an ottoman. Price noticed the noise from upstairs and decides to have a look, and senses something is not quite right. A cat and mouse game ensues, but not all is what it seems, least of all for Farr.This movie's the 2nd movie adaptation of a play written by J. Lee Thompson ('The Guns Of Navarone', 'Cape Fear'), who also directed this movie, his first. It explains why the movie plays out primarily in the Farr/Plunkett apartment. Comparisons can easily be made between this movie and Hitchcock's 'Rope', with the body hidden in plain sight in a piece of furniture, and an outsider smelling something fishy. Fun trivia, Dennis Price played in the first (TV) version of 'Rope', from 1939. In any case, Thompson does well here, the stage-y nature of the story doesn't slow down this movie, nor does the movie feel like a 'Rope' copy. It is well-made, tense, and also looks rather nice, with some good cinematography by William McLeod ('Alibi', 'Guilt Is My Shadow'). Despite being a Britnoir, there is an American voice-over who gives a weird, almost anecdotal narration at various points in the movie, proclaiming at the end of the movie he has to fly home again. It is a quirky touch, that did feel slightly out of place, but wasn't annoying.The 4 main characters, who are also the only credited ones, give good performances. Price ('Dear Murderer') turns up his posh British accent a notch above usual, while Farr ('Double Confession') is great as the panic-stricken man trying to think things through. Plunkett ('It Always Rains On Sunday') and Dowling ('For Them That Trespass') are a bit underused. I would've liked to have seen more of Dowling who does a great 'common' hostess who uses her looks and charm to try and move up in life.The movie has various twists and turns along the way, and a very ironic finale and ending (which I'm not sure would've passed the censors had it been made in the US). While it's nothing too noir-ish, it does provide some nice entertainment with good performances and excellent dialogue. Recommended. 7/10

I wonder whether scriptwriters take it upon themselves to insert a narrator into a script or if a producer does this to bolster a weak script.It can work e.g. Murder My Sweet but invariably it does not.I don't think that anything could save this film from mediocrity.Mind you the script seems to have taken ideas from Rope and the director the tilted camera angles from that Third Man.One of the big problems of this film is that characters are continually jumping to the wrong conclusions.Dennis Price does his usual character of a down at heels blackmailed.However his appearance in this film is evidence of his declining career.Apart from the deficiencies of the plot,this film could have made a good radio play.The director would go on to bigger and better films.

This first film J. Lee Thompson directed was based on his stage play of the same name. If not prison dramas, most of Thompson's noir themed films of the fifties like The Yellow Balloon were built on the same premise of a gullible victim convinced by someone else that he had committed murder when the crime never really happened. There is a big surprise twist at the end, it's not very believable because the blackmailer drinks from a poisoned glass and can walk to his own room so that our protagonist will not have to be charged with any crime for his death. To believe this, evidence of where the poison was would also have to be moved to the blackmailer's flat. Thompson hams this talk opera up during the climax with extreme face closeups and hysterical laughing. A binge drinker himself, it's not exactly a surprise that he conceived this tall tale. An obnoxious narrator often explains points in the plot that don't need to be heard. A less syrupy ending would have helped, too.