TWENTY-THREE PACES TO BAKER STREET
(20th Century-Fox-CinemaScope) \ MISS, they say, is as good as & dl % and a mere 23 paces from Baker Street (scarcely more than the width of a CinemaScope screen) proves to be a long step from the austere simlicities of a Sherlock Holmes story. ut, of course, these are more complicated times and the model for this whodunit seems to have been Rear Window. The prying, physically handicapped amateur this time is a blinded American playwright (Van Johnson), who overhears snatches of a suspicious conversation in a London pub and commits what he has heard, in the form of dialogue, to his tape-recorder. The police (Maurice Denham) are polite, but do nothing, and the hero finally comes to grips with the murderer in a blacked-out flat (a variation on Jimmy Stewart's flash-bulb defence). And, of course, there’s the attractive girlfriend (Vera Miles) to add a decorative note to the milieu. A shrewd head on pretty shoulders, too. "I don’t know," she says to Van, "why you insist on acting this way.’’ I couldn't fathom it either-unless he was acting under Henry Hathaway’s orders. If so, black mark, Henry!
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 888, 10 August 1956, Page 16
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191TWENTY-THREE PACES TO BAKER STREET New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 888, 10 August 1956, Page 16
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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