Here's a very good Brit-noir, atmospherically directed and centred on a commanding lead performance by a young James Mason, who you can see coming into his own here.
He plays a master surgeon specialising in head and eye injuries who sidelines in lectures on criminology. At the start of the film, we see him delivering a talk to his adoring young students, dispassionately demonstrating the "God-complex" as he recounts a case history of a man who feels justified in acting as judge, jury and executioner to revenge what he believes is an earlier unsolved murder.
What he doesn't tell the class of course is that the case is his own so that we're naturally taken in flashback to his affair with a young married woman played by Rosamund John, the mother of a young teenage girl whose life he saves on the operating table. Mason's own marriage, we learn, has broken down and he lives in solitude in his big house, containing yet again, another grand piano through which he lets out his emotions.
Even after the operation to save her daughter succeeds, Mason keeps on with the after-care only it's for the mother's benefit and it becomes clear that she too is unhappy in her marriage as they edge into but then back out of a clandestine affair. Hovering in the background however is her estranged husband's sister, Pamela Kellino, Mason's real-life wife at the time, with blackmail on her mind. Then, after the lovers have separated, John dies suddenly, falling out of a window with Kellino suspiciously on the scene, which is enough to bring Mason back as her avenging angel, or is it devil?
Mason with his dark good looks, ever-furrowed brow and strong silent demeanour could out-Heathcliffe Heathcliffe and pretty much carries the whole film, something he's already well capable of, but he's helped in this by a fast-moving plot which intrigues from the beginning and some stylish direction by a name not known to me, Lawrence Huntington, even if he does borrow a couple of vertiginous camera set-ups from Hitchcock. The dialogue gets a bit fuzzy and clunky towards the end especially when Mason encounters another cynical doctor out on the road and of course we know he must face retribution but these caveats aside, this was a compact, well-constructed thriller, different in tone, but not in overall effect, to the noirs coming out of Hollywood at around the same time.
He plays a master surgeon specialising in head and eye injuries who sidelines in lectures on criminology. At the start of the film, we see him delivering a talk to his adoring young students, dispassionately demonstrating the "God-complex" as he recounts a case history of a man who feels justified in acting as judge, jury and executioner to revenge what he believes is an earlier unsolved murder.
What he doesn't tell the class of course is that the case is his own so that we're naturally taken in flashback to his affair with a young married woman played by Rosamund John, the mother of a young teenage girl whose life he saves on the operating table. Mason's own marriage, we learn, has broken down and he lives in solitude in his big house, containing yet again, another grand piano through which he lets out his emotions.
Even after the operation to save her daughter succeeds, Mason keeps on with the after-care only it's for the mother's benefit and it becomes clear that she too is unhappy in her marriage as they edge into but then back out of a clandestine affair. Hovering in the background however is her estranged husband's sister, Pamela Kellino, Mason's real-life wife at the time, with blackmail on her mind. Then, after the lovers have separated, John dies suddenly, falling out of a window with Kellino suspiciously on the scene, which is enough to bring Mason back as her avenging angel, or is it devil?
Mason with his dark good looks, ever-furrowed brow and strong silent demeanour could out-Heathcliffe Heathcliffe and pretty much carries the whole film, something he's already well capable of, but he's helped in this by a fast-moving plot which intrigues from the beginning and some stylish direction by a name not known to me, Lawrence Huntington, even if he does borrow a couple of vertiginous camera set-ups from Hitchcock. The dialogue gets a bit fuzzy and clunky towards the end especially when Mason encounters another cynical doctor out on the road and of course we know he must face retribution but these caveats aside, this was a compact, well-constructed thriller, different in tone, but not in overall effect, to the noirs coming out of Hollywood at around the same time.