The Hangman Waits (Five Star Films Ltd., Butcher’s Film Service, 1947)

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

Last night (Monday, March 3) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing 1947 British film called The Hangman Waits, written and directed by A. Barr-Smith (the “A.” stood for “Albert,” by the way), who was born in Australia in 1905, acted in films both in Australia and the U.S., and then ended up in Britain where he directed this and a short called Death in the Hand (1948), a 43-minute film about a palm reader who predicts the murders of several people she’s traveling with on a train. The Hangman Waits is listed on imdb.com as being 63 minutes long but the version Charles and I saw on a YouTube post that was riddled with commercials (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWboiMWgiIY) was 49 minutes 31 seconds. The Hangman Waits is a peculiar mixture of fictional crime film and British documentary; it starts with a mysterious man confronting a young woman, Mary Carney (Beatrice Campbell), in front of a makeup table, locking the door of the room behind him, and advancing towards her with murderous intent. (We don’t see the actual murder.) Then he’s shown carrying a suitcase into Victoria Station in London and asking that the suitcase be stowed in place. The suitcase is so heavy that the person running the check-in stand needs a second person to help him lift it. When one of the people notices blood dripping from the suitcase onto his clothes as he lifted it, the two people who lifted the suitcase decide to open it and find out what’s in it. It turns out to be the torso of a missing woman, and later the woman’s head is found on a local beach. A. Barr-Smith and Five Star Films, the company he owned, cut a deal with the News of the World (then a broadsheet rather than a tabloid) to shoot much of the film in their offices and printing plant, though oddly he didn’t call the newspaper featured in the movie News of the World but rather gave it a fictitious name, the Daily Clarion.

News of the World was founded on October 1, 1843 by John Browne Bell in London, and as the cheapest paper in Britain at the time it quickly established a major audience among newly literate working-class Britons. According to its Wikipedia page, “It quickly established itself as a purveyor of titillation, shock, and criminal news. Much of the source material came from coverage of vice prosecutions, including lurid transcripts of police descriptions of alleged brothels, streetwalkers, and ‘immoral’ women.” Bell’s family ran it until 1891, when they sold it to Henry Lascelles Carr, publisher of the Western Mail in Wales. Carr’s family in turn held on to it until they sold it to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1969. In 1984 Murdoch turned News of the World from a broadsheet to a tabloid, and for the last decade of its existence it focused on celebrity exposés – though even before it became a tabloid it was notorious enough that Chrissie Hynde of the rock band The Pretenders name-checked it in her 1982 song “Back on the Chain Gang.” Finally Murdoch closed it in 2011 after five years’ worth of scandals, including reports that its staff members had hacked into private telephone lines to get stories. In 1947 it still ran its editorial offices in London but it was actually printed in Manchester – though through some creative geography Barr-Smith made it look in the movie like the paper was published and printed in the same city. The Hangman Waits cuts back and forth between the efforts of the murderer to flee, the efforts of the police to find him, and the efforts of the “Daily Clarion” to be there and cover the arrest.

The murder is not particularly mysterious; the criminal is identified fairly quickly as Andrew Sinclair (Anthony Baird), a theatre organist at the theatre where Mary Carney worked. It seems that Sinclair and Carney were dating each other when Carney ticked him off by starting an affair with the theatre’s manager, Peter Knight (Robert Wyndham), and Sinclair killed Carney out of jealousy. We see a lot of shots of Sinclair from the back, wearing the tell-tale raincoat he wore when he killed Carney, and at one point he tries to hide out in a church where the staff organist is practicing. The church organist leaves Sinclair in the church to go to a newsstand and buy the Daily Clarion, which is running a headline stating that the police have identified a theatre organist as the murderer. When the poor, hapless, doomed church organist returns to the church, Sinclair notices that he’s bought a paper and demands to read it. The church organist sneaks away from the console to call the police – Charles was amused that he dialed the British “999” emergency number, in use well before U.S. phone companies adopted 911 as a similar all-purpose emergency line – but as soon as he returns from making the phone call, Sinclair realizes what he’s done and kills him. There’s a nice shot of his body slumped against the organ console, with a drone-like chord playing from the keys on which his body fell. Ultimately the police arrive at the church, but Sinclair gets away (incidentally the police are shown carrying guns, which I thought British police had never done as of 1947; in Alfred Hitchcock’s first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, made in Britain in 1934, he had to show the cops obtaining guns from the military at a nearby armory before he could stage the final shoot-out) and he hides out at the Daily Clarion’s printing plant.

In the meantime we get some great shots, especially for a newspaper junkie like me, of just what producing a paper in the era before offset type entailed. First the copy is taken down, either written or (in the case of a late-breaking story like Mary Carney’s murder) dictated over the phone. It’s typed up and sent to the composing room on long conveyor belts to which the copy is clipped. Then it’s typeset on a Linotype machine, whose output is used as a mold for a metal plate from which the actual printing will be done. Any photos that go with the article will be stripped in separately, half-toned to make them printable, and cut into the master mold before the plates are manufactured. (Pre-produced ads in those days often came from the advertiser or their agency as papier-machê molds that could be inserted into the master plates before the metal was poured to make the negative printing plates. I remember seeing a few of those at the College of Marin Times in the early 1970’s; we had to explain to advertisers submitting ads that way that we were offset-printed.) Ultimately Sinclair is trapped in the Daily Clarion print building after he, like so many panicked or simply stupid movie criminals before him, tries to escape by fleeing up instead – which only makes him more trapped. He leaps to his death from a high window to the street below after telling the police official who’s trying to arrest him that he has no family “except for the people outside, and I should hate to disappoint them.” The film isn’t much in synopsis, but it’s got some great scenes, representing both the fictional story and the newspaperpeople’s involvement in it, including the way in which Barr-Smith poaches some of the extravagant effects John Grierson and the filmmakers of the British Film Unit used in their documentaries. Stunning shots of trains criss-crossing the street, ominously lit and most likely red-filtered as well, and the scenes of the actual printing of the “Daily Clarion,” and overall The Hangman Waits is a quite good and appealing mixture of documentary technique and a fictional story, and quite a bit more creative cinematically than the Louis de Rochemont quasi-documentaries being made in the U.S. at the time (The House on 92nd Street, 13 Rue Madeleine, Boomerang!, Call Northside 777).