Dear Murderer (Gainsborough Pictures, J. Arthur Rank, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I ran my husband Charles a fascinating movie on YouTube, a 1947 film called Dear Murderer that was one of the sporadic attempts by British filmmakers to make films noir. Dear Murderer egan life as a play by St. John Legh Clowes that had premiered in a small London theatre specializing in Grand Guignol-type fare and was so sensationally popular it got transferred to the West End in 1946. Produce Sydney Boix bought the film rights to it and produced it at Gainsborough Pictures, the venerable production company that had helped launch Alfred Hitchcock’s career in the 1930’s but, thanks largely to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s closure of most of the British film industry for two years in the middle of World War II, had fallen on hard times as the war drew to a close. The plot deals with Lee Warren (Eric Portman, a strong and powerful actor even though a bit on the homely side, though that’s not inappropriate for the S.O.B. he’s playing), who returns to London following an eight-month business trip to the U.S. While he was in New York doing a big deal for his employer (though we never find out who he works for, what he was doing for them in New York, or what the overall business of his company is), he left his wife Vivian (Greta Gynt) behind but asked her to write him every day.

She did that for the flrst three weeks, but after that his letters stopped coming and he even went to the trouble and expense of arranging a long-distance phone call, to no avail. So when he returns he’s already convinced that his wife has been having extra-relational activities, and as soon as he comes to his home he finds letters addressed to her from a man named “Richard.” Lee checks out the address on the letters and finds that “Richard” is Richard Fenton (Dennis Price), and when Lee shows up at Richard’s place seeking vengeance the exterior looked enough like No. 190 Downing Street that I was briefly tempted to joke, “Is she cheating on him with the Prime Minister?” Actually, Richard Fenton is a barrister (a courtroom attorney; in Britain business lawyers are called solicitors, and Mexican law makes a similar distinction between an abogado, a courtroom lawyer, and a licenciado, a business lawyer), and when Lee shows up at Richard’s flat he offers him a deal. He will explain his plot to murder him, and if Richard can see ant flaw in it that could lead to Lee being caught, convicted and hanged (when this film was made Britain still had the death penalty),he will let Richard live. In a vain attempt to get Lee to spare him, Richard tells him that Vivian has other alternate boyfriends in her life besides him.

Lee ties up Richard with silk scarves so there won’t be any marks on him, and Lee also has Richard write a farewell letter to Vivian and then, after the first letter is ruined when Lee spills a drink on it, he has Richard write it over again but stops him in the middle to make it look like a suicide note. Lee’s plan is to incapacitate Richard and then stick his head in the oven so he will die of asphyxiation and it will look like he committed suicide. Only Lee’s plan goes awry when Vivian shows up at Richard’s apartment with yet another young man in tow, Jimmy Martin (Maxwell Reed). Lee shifts his plan to make it look like Jimmy killed Richard, so this will get rid of both Vivian’s extra-marital lovers in one fell swoop: he’ll have killed Riichard and Jimmy will hang for Lee’s crime. Only Vivian offers to reconcile with her husband if Lee undoes the frame on Jimmy, and Lee tells Inspector Pembury of the London police (played by a British actor named Jack Warner, a name Charles got a kick out of because of the far more celebrated and important Jack Warner, studio head of Warner Bros. in the U.S.) a preposterous version of the events in which he omits any responsibility for Richard’s death but tries to exonerate Jimmy. Then it turns out that Vivian loved Jimmy after all, and she works out a plan to kill her husband and make it look like he committed suicide, exactly the way Lee tried to off Richard in the opening scenes – but the cops catch on and at the end Lee is dead and Vivian is arrested for killling him.

Dear Murderer is actually a well-done movie, except for two strange scenes in which the background music is mixed so loud it drowns out the dialogue (the composer is Benjamin Frankel, but the music is performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra with Muir Matheson as conductor, and them I’d heard of). Director Arthur Crabtree turns in a quite atmospheric job (though he couldn’t keep Eric Portman from overacting), and the writing by Sydney Box himself along with his wife Muriel and Peter Rogers took a rather talky play and made a viable movie out of it. They were aided by Stephen Dade’s appropriately chiaroscuro cinematography – Dear Murderer looks like a film noir, at least, even though it’s only borderline thematically (had Vivian been developed more into a true femme fatale this movie would be closer to film noir than it is). The cast is pretty no-name – the only actor in the film whose name I recognized was Hazel Court, pretty wasted ini the thankless role of Richard’s sister Avis, who was Jimmy’s lover until Vivian seduced him away from her – but they’re effective in the workmanlike way of British actors. Dear Murderer is a neat movie and an effective suspense piece – the many reversals pretty much stay within the bounds of credibility – even though Charles and I predictably argued about the moral. “It’s a movie about the destructive power of jealousy and possessiveness!: I said – and Charles replied, “No, it’s a movie about the destructive power of cheating!”