UNEASY TERMS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 651, 21 December 1951, Page 15

UNEASY TERMS

(Pathe) AR vets Or 5 sa the advertisenéasy Terms is the first Peter Cheyney story to be filmed. If this is typical Cheyney it would cast no shadow over my film-going future to know that it was to be the last. Not being familiar with this particular masterpiece, I wasn’t at all sure when the filmy opened whether Slim Callaghan (Michael Rennie) was the villain’ or the hero; and, though I hadn’t any doubt about what the film had tried to say, I wasn’t much more sure at the end. Poor girl, I thought, as Barbara Allardyce (Moira Lister), her conversation already showing the influence of associating with this cheap private detective, was carried off by himpoor gifl! Cheap is a word I very much dislike using ut people. It suggests a lack of sympathy-a failute to understandwhich I’m inclined to regard as the worst Grime in the calendaft. But I think it can be used of this creation of the late Mr. Cheyney. What makes Uneasy Terms so thoroughly objectionable is its attempt to make a film hero out of a character who has a complete lack of respect for other people. After Callaghan’s shocking fudeness to several women who cross his path, one would have been surprised not to find him sooner or later in a fight where the boot seems to be the main weapon and the stomach the favoured target-a fight which would be a more disgusting piece of cinema if it were not so absurdly overdone. One feels rather sorry that Inspector Gringall, the only really likeable character in the film, doesn’t (as he has threatened to) run this bright boy in for tampering with evidence. This is a bad film, and I’ve gone to the trouble of saying at such length why I found it so because it’s bad in a vicious, anti-social way.