TIGER IN THE SMOKE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 945, 20 September 1957, Page 30

TIGER IN THE SMOKE

(Rank-Leslie Parkyn) A Cert. Did you put the tiger out, Min? -I didn’t know it was on fire, Henry. \ HERE there’s smoke there should be fire, and there is murk enough in the opening sequences of this Margery Allingham thriller to suggest quite a cheery little blaze to come. Indeed, for a while it looks even more promising than that. There are one or two passages near the start where camera-angles and lighting (or the lack of it) reminded me strongly of that vintage gaslit shocker Hanover Square. And in that cne the late Laird Cregar lit a bonfire which (for me, at least) has hardly been ex-tinguished-or eclipsed for macabre horror-in the intervening decade, Tiger in the Smoke offers us postwar London instead of Victorian London, neon tube for gaslight and taxis in place of hansoms, but fundamentally it belongs to the same genre and uses the same devices-darkness and a neurotic, unpredictable killer at large-to raise the hair on the back of our necks. And when the blanket of the dark is reinforced by fog (a full-bodied London particular), neon tube might just as well be gaslight anyway. No, I have no fault to find with the mise-en-scéne. The ominous night watches in the London streets, which occupy most of the film; the sunlit vertiginous perspectives of the Brittany cliffs in the last sequence of all, are ready-made for melodrama and tension. And if Geoffrey Unsworth’s photography only occasionally rises above the competent it does not fall below it. No serious criticism either could be levelled at the lower echelons of the cast. Christopher Rhodes, though he didn’t rate large type in the credits, made an admirable Chief Inspectorbrusque, bothered at times, and always completely credible. Beatrice Varley’s Mrs Cash was chillingly effective, and the raggle-taggle band of villainous street musicians, who might easily have slipped from the ominous into the ridiculous, didn’t. What contributed most to damping down the blaze was miscasting in the upper bracket. Muriel Pavlow did not manage to persuade me at any stage that she was panic or terror-stricken, and it would not have been difficult to find someone more convincing than Donald Sinden-bowler-hatted, Savile Row suited-as her stout-hearted defender. But it is the Tiger himself, the homicidal oc, who is the most unfortunate ag@nt of deflation. When we had been told that meeting him was like seeing death for the first time, it was a catastrophic let-down to discover that he would have made a passable stand-in for Alan Ladd. Tony Wright might do reasonably well as a romaptic lead, but villainy is not his métier. Havoc was what he played, I would agree, but with a small A.