Faces in the Dark (1964)

A businessman called Richard Hammond (John Gregson) is visited by his wife Christiane (Mia Zetterling) at his factory who asks for a divorce. That same day Hammond is blinded as a result of an accident in his workshop and his wife backs down on her decision vowing to take care of him. Richard's layabout brother Max (John Ireland) appears asking for money and his business partner David Merton (Michael Denison) seems keen to take over the day to day running of the business completely. Prior to the accident, Merton was worried because his partner was insistent on his company funding the Apollo bulb project entirely by themselves despite warnings from the bank and offers from a rival firm to put financial backing into it. It risked bankrupting them completely. When the Hammonds go to their Cornish summer house for a holiday, they are joined by David and Max and Richard starts to suspect that his wife and business partner are plotting to drive him insane before murdering him. However, his blindness means that he is very vulnerable and it is even harder for him to prove his suspicions against them...A long missed British psychological thriller with a plot that promises to be a real nail biter, but somehow fails to connect with our nerves throughout the first half of the picture. The concept of a vulnerable blind man being tricked into believing that he is losing his mind is a good one and the screenplay by Ephraim Kogan and John Tully from a novel by Pierre Boileau (the guy who wrote the novel upon which Hitchcock's Vertigo was based) allows for a number of twists and turns that really should pile on the suspense. For example, Gregson's attempts to find his way around what he believes to be his holiday home in Cornwall - in reality, Christiane and David have transported him to a similar property in France in order to get him away from any contact with anybody he knows and making it easier to murder him without suspicion - and discovering that things are not in their proper places such as wall sockets not being in the place they should be when he goes to plug in his electric razor and the peach trees he once planted in the gardens are not in the place he remembers them. Then, later, he is lead to believe that his brother has died and he gets his chauffeur to drive him to the cemetery so that he can visit the grave and finds his own name carved on the headstone. Yet, director David Eady is unable to get a performance from his leading man that conveys the sense of paranoia, self doubt and helplessness of his character for it to ignite and the build up is sadly rather flat and lifeless.However, the film does pick up speed and resource in an exciting last reel when Gregson escapes from the house and runs helplessly through the woods at night. The suspense increases when he comes to a railroad crossing and the barriers come down trapping him and he only narrowly avoids being run over by a train. Ken Hodges' b/w camera-work works wonders in these scenes. He awakes at a hospital where he finds that the doctor and nurse attending to him are French and they do not believe his story about Christiane and David's elaborate plot to drive him out of his mind before killing him so that they can get control of his money believing him to be mad. They send for his wife to come and take him home despite his protestations and he is immediately put back into dire peril. The climax, it has to be said, carries a genuine charge of fear and there is little sense of relief either. So, despite a slow start, Faces In The Dark is nonetheless well worth the watch.

FACES IN THE DARK is one of those intriguing, long-forgotten little British thrillers of the early '60s. It's an essential three-hander in which the unlikeable John Gregson plays an industry boss who ends up getting blinded in a freak factory accident. He's forced to recuperate, being looked after by his wife Mai Zetterling and second-in-command John Ireland, but soon becomes convinced that everything isn't as it should be.This is a film that makes the very best of a low budget thanks to a unique-feeling storyline and plenty of suspense that builds up, particularly in the second half. The first half is a little slow and stately, but as a mystery this throws clues at you every now and then before finally letting rip towards the climax with an excellent twist. From that point in it never disappoints, right up until the arresting climax. FACES IN THE DARK certainly holds its own against bigger budget fare in this viewer's opinion.

I was staggered to read some of the other reviews of this film, as I found it to be one of the best mystery thrillers it has been my pleasure to see. From start to finish, this is a film which does not flag, which remains taut and full of suspense throughout, and which keeps the viewer endlessly and tensely speculating about just what is going on : is the blinded Mr Hammond just paranoid, or is he really likely to be murdered ? That is perhaps the main question, but there are other related issues which keep the viewer on tenterhooks, and the overall result is an excellent hour and a half's viewing. All good things come to an end, as they say, and this film certainly comes to an end that one never could see coming !

This taut little gem was on British television last night - January 23rd 2010 - on the Film 24 channel, which has been treating old movie fans to some really obscure titles recently including two other John Gregson films ' To Dorothy A Son ' and ' SOS Pacific '.I have now recorded it in case it's another 50 years before it turns up! It's got a very dark, disturbing ending for a British film made in 1959, no doubt because of it's French literary origins.While it's definitely worth thriller & mystery lovers spending 90 minutes of their time, the sudden disappearance of John Ireland ( who adopts a pretty good English accent as Gregsons ner-do-well brother ) mid-way through the film, is the biggest mystery of all.I believe he was making the TV action series " The Cheaters " in London at the same time so maybe he had to bow out of " Faces In The Dark " because of other work commitments.He didn't even have a dramatic death scene...suddenly he was gone and referred to as being dead! All these years later, we'll never know why an actor of his stature had such a minor role in the film,