This is yet another victim of technology i.e. films that were perfectly acceptable on their initial release - anything up to approximately 1970 - when audiences were much more inclined to settle for diverissment and less inclined to ask awkward questions; for example there is a moment shortly after a body has been found on the common when a constable finds a letter, hands it to the inspector who proceeds to read it with neither wearing gloves and thus adding two sets of innocent fingerprints to the possible guilty set already there. Director Roy Baker (he added the 'Ward' later) made a decent fist of his first assignment though he had no more success than any other director in getting John Mills to play a convincing love scene; this was, for example, the third time Mills had played opposite Kay Walsh in five years and in the first two they actually married in the course of the film yet they might as well have been playing siblings and Joan Greenwood has no more success in waking his dormant libido than any other actress. Terence Rattigan may well have 'borrowed' the notion of a hotel peopled with 'characters' including a vicious woman who attempts to blacken the name of a fellow guest when he came to write Separate Tables some seven years later but did so much better than Eric Ambler. Despite these caveats it remains both watchable and enjoyable.
Review of The October Man
