SHOOT FIRST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 794, 8 October 1954, Page 22

SHOOT FIRST

(United Artists-Raymond Stross) O avid reader of thrillers, I sometimes feel a bit unconditioned when I strike one at the movies. A regular shot in the arm, a steady concentration in the blood, I tell myself, and I'd pick up those important smaller flaws and not only the ones you could drive a trolly-bus through. So I’m fairly easily entertained though less easily pleased. Looking for the suspense and pace found in such films as The Narrow Margin, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, I sometimes find myself almost satisfied by quite different and in some ways more agreeable qualities-the kind that helped to make a modest little British thriller like Double Confession look better than it was. Shoot First goes some way ‘towards satisfying both appetites. The pace is far from killing, but fast enough to hold the interest, there’s a Dorsetshire setting for most of the action as a welcome change from the neon-lit canyons of New York and Chicago, the policemen are civilised, there’s a minimum of violence and no gum chewing, and so on. Scripted by Eric Ambler from Geoffrey Household’s novel A Rough Shoot, the film opens strongly with a sequence in which an American colonel (Joel McCrea) who is out shooting imagines that a charge of shot he has fired at a supposed poacher has killed the man. He’s dead all right, but with someone else’s bullet through his heart. The colonel’s attempts to conceal the body involve him with both sides in a spy plot, and he ends up helping M15, represented for the time being by a very dashing Pole (Herbert Lom), and. one

of your imperturbable Englishmen (Roland Culver). It should spoil no one’s enjoyment of the film to say that the trail leads eventually to London and Madame ‘Tussaud’s waxworks, and a highly dramatic though not, I think, altogether satisfying climax. On the way it brings in two very. well-rubbed screen thriller~ clichés-the railway journey and our never-failing old friend the chase up the long open stairway to the rooftops. The railway sequence is notable for a scene involving a_ brief case complete with booby trap, but otherwise it whets the interest without coming to very much. The shots on the stairway are more successful. Mr. McCrea and Evelyn ‘Keyes (as his wife), the top billed stars, turn in competent performances, but I'm afraid we see them most of the time in the shadow of Mr. Lom. With cloak and swordstick and a_ wholly delightful swagger, he has-and makes the most of -a part full of opportunities, Shoot First (which, by the way, was directed by Robert Parrish) is an entertaining piece with some undeniably suspenseful passages; though for all its actionpacked climax I fee] that it doesn’t even then quite fulfil its promise of high excitement.