THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 779, 25 June 1954, Page 26

THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR

(Associated British) HETHER disguised as the thriller writer, Josephine Tey, or as the dramatist Gordon Daviot, the late (and selfeffacing) Miss Elizabeth MacKintosh was an enthusiastic and indefatigable historical researcher and most of her best work was the fruit of that enthusiasm and industry. The Franthise Affair, one of her detective stories, belongs to this category, but though it was suggested by a cause célébre of the 18th Century the author set her story in the late 1940s. The time-shift, however, accentuates the drama, for the story concerns two gentlewomen (aged mother and unmarried daughter) who are arraigned on a charge of kidnapping a girl of 15-and while (as every schoolboy knows) that kind of capricious behaviour was a commonplace two or three hundred years ago it conveys chilly suggestions of abnormal psychology when placed in a contemporary setting. The Franchise Affair is, in fact, a welltold tale-a mystery without a murderin which one’s interest is maintained by well-manipulated suspense, by a nicelyvariegated assortment of characters, and

by good dialogue. And the film version measures up remarkably well to the novel. Since it tells in something like an hour and a half a story which would take most of us more than twice that time to read, the suspense is not (so to speak) quite so suspended, but the best of the dialogue has been culled for the film-script and the acting is good. Undoubtedly The Franchise Affair gained in my estimation by comparison with the hackney-coloured hokum which was Hollywood’s contribution for the week, but it can stand quite steadily on its own feet. It is Sbviously a low-budget movie-I suppose the most expensive set-piece was the courtroom scene, so indispensable to the English thriller (American film-crimes, in my experience, are nore often settled out of court)but there is nothing cheap about the acting, even in the walk-on parts. The principal players are Michael Denison, Dulcie Gray and Marjorie Fielding, and of these the last-named (as the elderly accused) gives easily the most interesting performance. Lawrence Huntington directed.