Postmark for Danger, a.k.a. Portrait of Alison, a.k.a. Alison (Insignia Pictures, Todon Productions, Anglo-American Film Distributors, RKO, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 29) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing and rather bizarre film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies: Postmark for Danger, a.k.a. Portrait of Alison or just Alison, a 1955 British production starring American actress Terry Moore along with an all-British supporting cast in an odd suspense story that blatantly rips off the Rouben Mamoulian/Otto Preminger 1944 film Laura. It was directed by Guy Green from a script he co-wrote with Ken Hughes (later a director himself) from a story written by Francis Durbridge as a BBC-TV miniseries. (For years I had misgendered Francis Durbridge because of a typo in William K. Everson’s 1972 book The Detective in Film that referred to him as Frances Durbridge.) The film begins with an auto crash on a winding country road in Milan, Italy in which a car is driven off the road by another oncoming car, crashes and burns. At this point we don’t know who was driving or who, if anyone, was in the car next to them. The film then cuts to its opening credits, and the first thing we see after those is a scene in the studio of painter Tim Forrester (Robert Beatty), who’s in the middle of doing a beer advertisement with model Jill Stewart (Josephine Griffin). Tim invites Jill to dine with him that night, but she says she already has a date with a rich man she’s hoping to marry, Henry Carmichael (Allan Cuthbertson). In fact, when she returns to Tim’s studio the next day, she’s happy because Henry has already proposed to her and she’s looking forward to the wedding. She leaves behind a mystery package she was supposed to bring to Henry but decided to deliver in person rather than spend the time and money to mail it – only she absent-mindedly leaves it behind in Tim’s studio. We then learn that the victims in the car crash in Milan were Tim’s brother Lewis, a journalist who was about to expose an international jewel-smuggling gang called the “Arlington Ring,” and his girlfriend, actress Alison Ford (Terry Moore). Ford’s father, John Smith (Henry Oscar) – her name too was “Smith” originally but she took “Ford” as a stage name – hires Tim to paint her portrait from a photograph and gives Tim a dress Alison owned because he wants the painting to feature Alison wearing that dress.

Only Alison Ford turns up, very much alive, and walks into Tim’s studio at night (he has a penchant for leaving his door unlocked when he goes out), grabs a paintbrush and whites out her face on the painting, and also steals the photo from which Tim was painting her. Tim flies out to Milan with his brother Dave (William Sylvester), a charter pilot who owns his own plane, to identify Lewis’s body even though the two victims were so badly burned as to defy recognition. Later we learn that the woman who died with Lewis was probably a hitch-hiker he picked up after John Smith warned his daughter not to get in that car. The implication, later confirmed as true, was that John Smith is part of the Arlington Ring and knew that the gang was setting Lewis up to be killed and didn’t want to lose his daughter as collateral damage. When they got back to Britain, Tim and Dave discover that his former model Jill Stewart had been killed in Tim’s studio; she’d been posed in Alison’s old dress and sprawled out on Tim’s bed when she was killed. The police immediately suspect Tim of the murder, but there are two clues that could conceivably crack the case. One is a postcard with a crude drawing of a woman holding a chianti bottle that Lewis mailed from Europe, and the other is the mysterious package Jill mistakenly left behind in Tim’s flat just days before she was killed there. Tim receives a mysterious phone call from a blackmailer named Reg Dorking (William Lucas), who runs a used-car lot as a front, and the police set up a dummy money roll with which Tim can pay Dorking – only Dorking doesn’t have the postcard, and says the person who does is Fenby (Terence Alexander), a colleague of Lewis’s on the Gazette newspaper. Tim is embarrassed when he tries to hide out Alison in his apartment, having her stay in his brother’s room, only when he calls the police the next morning Alison has disappeared for fear of getting her father caught as a member of the Arlington Ring.

The police examine the contents of Jill’s mysterious package, which turns out to be an empty chianti bottle engraved with the name “Nightingale & Sons” – a firm which the cops discover doesn’t exist. From this they deduce that “Nightingale & Sons” is a front for the Arlington Ring, and eventually Dave admits to Tim that he was involved in it as a pilot who could easily smuggle stolen diamonds from country to country under the cover of his normal charter service. The police also recover the postcard (ya remember the postcard?) from the effects of Fenby after he’s killed, and discover it contained a full list of the members of the Arlington Ring. Tim tries to hide out Alison in his apartment, but someone else comes to call on her – it’s Henry Carmichael, Jill’s former fiancé, who’s [spoiler alert!] the secret head of the Arlington Ring and the killer of both Jill and Fenby. Tim tries to rescue Carmichael and eventually the two men have a fight and Tim pushes Carmichael out of a window to his death on the sidewalk below. Later there’s a quirky denouement that lets us know Tim and Alison are going to get together as a couple. Postmark for Danger a.k.a. Portrait of Alison (a title which reminded me of two great songs, J. Russell Robinson’s “Portrait of Jennie” – also from a movie about an enigmatic young woman surrounded by an air of mystery – and Elvis Costello’s “Alison”) a.k.a. Alison is an O.K. movie. It’s hardly film noir, either thematically or visually, but it’s effective entertainment and holds the viewer’s interest. It could have used a more interesting female lead than Terry Moore (an actress named Helen Shingler had played her character in the TV miniseries), but she was an American mini-star and part of the package deal by which the film was made and distributed by RKO just after Howard Hughes, Moore’s former boyfriend (and, according to her own account, her husband; she made enough of a claim that the Hughes estate paid her a settlement after Hughes died), sold the studio and it went through about three years of corporate post-traumatic stress disorder before finally going out of business in 1958.