Blackout, a.k.a. Murder by Proxy (Lippert Pictures, Exclusive Films, Hammer Films, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, June 13) my husband Charles and I watched the latest Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” episode, a really quirky 1954 film alternately called Murder by Proxy in its native Great Britain and Blackout in the U.S. Like Four-Sided Triangle and “X” the Unknown, which Charles and I had watched recently, it was made under a co-production deal between Robert Lippert’s company in the U.S. and Exclusive Films (which both before and after this was known as Hammer Films, and within a few years would make The Curse of Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula and thereby take over from Universal as the world’s main purveyor of Gothic horror on film) in the U.K. The deal was that Hammer would supply the production staff and supporting actors, while Lippert would offer American stars to boost the films’ appeal to U.S. audiences. Alas, Lippert couldn’t afford the biggest names in Hollywood, so he had to settle for Dane Clark, who’d had a fair-to-middling career as a Warner Bros. contract star (he was Jewish and his real name was Bernard Zanville, but as they had previously with Edward G. Robinson nèe Emmanuel Goldenberg and John Garfield nèe Julius Garfinkel, Warners gave him an Anglo name). Warners were hoping that Clark could take over from Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield, but he was too much a thug type for that to work. Blackout was based on a novel by Helen Nielsen, who would never again have a novel directly adapted to the screen, though she would sell a number of scripts to TV series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Perry Mason. Blackout is a convoluted story in which a former U.S. World War II soldier named Casimir (Dane Clark) has rechristened himself “Casey Morrow” and is bumming around Europe. He's in London at a swanky nightclub (as swanky as a Hammer production budget could make it, anyway) listening to British jazz singer Cleo Laine do a quite nice version of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Then an electrifying-looking woman named Phyllis Brunner (Belinda Lee, who was just 19 when she made this; she worked steadily for the next six years until dying suddenly in an auto accident at age 25) sidles up to his table and offers to pay for his drinks. Eventually she offers him 500 pounds if he’ll marry her that very night, and he accepts, only to wake up the next morning with blood on his overcoat and no memory of what happened to him the night before.

He awakens in a flat occupied by Phyllis’s slightly older roommate Margaret “Maggie” Doone (Eleanor Summerfield), where the first thing he sees is a large portrait Maggie has painted of Phyllis. With only the vaguest memories of what happened to him the night before, Casey goes out for a walk and runs into a news agent selling copies of the Daily Mail, whose lead story is of the sudden murder of Phyllis’s father that night. At Maggie’s urging, Casey starts investigating the case himself, fearful that if he goes to the police he’ll be arrested for the crime, especially since with her dad and mom having separated, Phyllis will be next in line to inherit her dad’s fortune and therefore Casey will have had an enormous motive for knocking him off. Casey learns that Phyllis was engaged to marry the Brunner family’s lawyer, Lance Gordon (Andrew Osborn), who turns out to be an egotistical creep. He also finds out from Phyllis’s mother Alicia (Betty Ann Davies) that Gordon was scamming the family by soliciting phony “contributions” to an alleged charity called “Green Pastures.” This was supposedly an outreach to set up homes for children left orphaned by World War II, but it was really a scam sucking money from the Brunner family fortune to buy houses that didn’t exist. At one point after visiting Gordon, Casey is tailed by the driver of another car who attempts to run him down. Later he traces the recipient of the check Alicia Brunner cut to buy the phony property for “Green Pastures” and it’s Victor Vanno (Harold Lang), who was also Travis, the driver who tried to kill Casey earlier. There are three main suspects, including Phyllis herself; attorney Gordon; and the actual killer [spoiler alert!], Alicia Brunner, who knocked off her husband because he was allowing Gordon to swindle him out of large chunks of the family fortune. Also Phyllis at first insists that she married Casey, then denies it, then acknowledges it again after her mom has been popped for murdering her dad. The film ends with Casey and Phyllis committing to each other and deciding to make their marriage work, which will be a lot easier than it would be otherwise because with her father dead and her mother on the way to the gallows for killing him, Phyllis is going to inherit the Brunner fortune.

“Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller classified Blackout as part of a sub-genre called “blackout noir,” of which the most famous examples are Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944) and Roy William Neill’s Black Angel (1946), both made at Universal in the U.S. and both based on stories by Cornell Woolrich. Black Angel is arguably the most intriguing example of the genre because the lead character, Dan Duryea, is suspected of murder, works with his wife (June Vincent) to clear himself, and ultimately realizes that he’s the killer after all. Muller also faulted the script of Blackout by Richard H. Landau for containing too many extended passages of expository dialogue which the director, Terence Fisher (who’d later work on most of Hammer’s horrors), shot quickly and in single takes. He pointed out one scene in which Dane Clark blew his line and said, “I know,” when he was supposed to say, “You know,” then corrected himself immediately – and Fisher left it in the final cut. He also mentioned the problems the film’s script supervisor (they used to be called “script girls” and now are called “continuity people,” and their job is to make sure that scenes match and you don’t see an actor with a hat on in one shot and without it in another shot supposedly taking place at the same time), Renée Glynne, had with Belinda Lee. As the Wikipedia page on the film explains, “Script supervisor Renee Glynne later recalled that Belinda Lee ‘was still very inexperienced at that time and I had to watch her quite carefully. She’d cross her legs the wrong way or turn her head at the wrong moment or come out with the wrong line, so I'd have to correct her and try to help her out. Dane [Clark] obviously fancied her and got very cross with my professional interference. He got quite nasty and was actually pushing me away from her.’ Glynne says she had to take medication ‘in order to survive the rest of the film. After that I had to give all my instructions to him through the director, Terry Fisher ... after some shots he'd have to put his head under cold water because he was so enraged that I was even there. Eventually he realized how silly it all was and went down on his knees, tears streaming down his face, begging me to forgive him. But I still asked [Hammer producer] Tony Hinds to take me off the next film he was in.’” Blackout a.k.a. Murder by Proxy is only tangentially a film noir, and the ending is really a cheat; Eddie Muller joked about how unlikely it seemed that Casey and Phyllis would be able to make their marriage work, and I had thought it would end with Casey and Maggie getting together because she seemed like a much better, more down-to-earth match for him even though they would have both been broke financially.