GREEN FOR DANGER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 430, 19 September 1947, Page 25

GREEN FOR DANGER

(Rank-Individual)

OR this British film no drums have been beaten, no fldgs have flown; but in its own competent, unobtrusive way it should return you good

value for your money. It will, I hope, do the same for its producers, who must have spent on it only about a quarter of what it costs to make the average grandiose American (or, for that matter, British) film these days. Green for Danger, a murder-mystery set in a rural hospital in Kent during the period of the flying-bombs, was made by the team of Launder and Gilliat who gave us The Rake’s Progress and, more ently, I See a Dark Stranger. What hey do here is not very much out of the Ordinary, but they have a neat, crisp style of scripting and editing, and a lightheartedness of treatment which carries the story successfully over the rougher patches of melodrama. With its double murder, its maze of clues, its suspicions and jealousies, its bungling detective, and. even its element of neurosis, the film is little different, so far as plot-material goes, from the average Hollywood whounit. This is, in fact, the British equiva"nt of The Big Sleep or The Black sangel or almost any other product of the Hollywood crime school. But in manner and spirit how far apart! Where the one is rough and tough, the other is

always polite and well-behaved. Both styles of film-making have their merits and their proper place in the cinema, and I leave you to decide which you prefer; but it is certainly an agreeable change to encounter murder-suspects who don’t behave like morons or thugs and a detective who isn’t an inverted gangster. There is, indeed, a very pleasant lack of heroics about the whole of Green for Danger. Nobody in it is ashamed to. confess to being scared of flying-bombs, and Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim) scuttles for safety in a way that is positively craven-and very natural-when-ever one comes over, This representative of Scotland Yard is also an egregious ass on most occasions: we’re used to the ordinary flat-footed copper in fiction, but here is smug ineptitude on a_ higher plane. Indeed, his bumbling pomposity and unshakable complacency become, in the finish, even a little over-done-yet after a succession of supermen-sleuths, this fatuous Cockrill is to be welcomed. Though Alastair Sim attracts most attention and most of the laughs, he isn’t the only interesting personality in the film. There’s Trevor Howard (of Briet Encounter) as one of "the two doctors mixed up in the murders at the hospital, and Leo Genn (formerly the Constable of France in Henry V) as the other; and Sally Gray, Rosamund John, and Megs Jenkins are the nurses who are interested in the doctors as well as in the

murders. There’s also a postman, identity unknown, whose collapse under anaesthesia launches the story into an atmosphere of foul play, jealousy, flying-bombs and repressed hysteria. Director and cameraman introduce some neat touches into the settings, though I wouldn’t claim much originality for them, their sequences in the operating theatre, for instance, and especially their trick of photographing the ceiling as the patient is wheeled in, bearing a very close resemblance to certain sequences in Stairway to Heaven. Nor would I like to suggest that you will be able to follow your way through the evidence without losing the thread now and then and bypassing one or two clues, But it’s the final impression that counts; and even if Messrs. Launder and Gilliat haven’t actually done much more than produce a pot-boiler, they have at least managed to keep the pot merrily on the boil the whole time.