FOOTSTEPS IN THE FOG

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 870, 6 April 1956, Page 21

FOOTSTEPS IN THE FOG

(Frankovich-Columbia) J(OOTSTEPS IN THE FOG illustrates (if I may use a word which I have been saving up for a long time) ‘the dichotomy of W. W. Jacobs. Most of us know him for his comic bargees and longshoremen, but Jacobs had another selfyou might say an alter esau-with a flair for the uncanny, the melodramatic and the macabre. It was in this mood that he wrote the story called The Interruption from which Footsteps in the Fog was constructed. And of its kindthe gaslit, late-Victorian costume piece -this is quite a competent piece of construction. Stewart Granger, it is true, appears in his usual manifestation as the saturnine hero-villain, and Mrs. Granger (who plays opposite him) is something of a speckled apple, too, but my impression of the casting was that it was good at all levels, and some of the minor players-in particular Finlay Currie, William Hartnell and Peter Bull -performed excellently well. But for the filmgoer simply in search of vicarious excitement the picture’s chief attraction will be, I think, the intricacies of the plot and the neat and methodical fashion in which the apparently loose ends are all eventually remembered and tidily tied up. In this, if you are familiar with his style, you will detect the hand of Jacobs, rather than that of Arthur Lubin, the director. As the title suggests, Footsteps in the Fog is a murky melodrama, Granger has the part of a suave villain who has divested himself of an ageing spouse by adding strychnine (or something like it) to her diet. How he fooled the family physician is not revealed, but he didn’t manage to fool the housemaid Lucy (Jean Simmons), who nourishes an unsanctified passion for her master and is not above using blackmail to satisfy it. To get rid of Lucy, her employer is driven to desperate lengths and, as it turns out, is eventually hoist with his own pharmacopoeia. I might add that the more hectic crises in the story are underscored by passages of strident mood-music, one of which (it accompanies the great pdisoning scene) is more suggestive of acute abdominal agony than anything I have encountered this side of atonality.