Rent Wanted for Murder (1946)

Cut a Cigar is a Smoke - Wanted for Murder review by CH

Forster-like, one may as well begin with Spoliansky's music. That is to say, his score for Wanted for Murder (1946) is highly romantic. Did it inspire the choice of Rachmaninov for Brief Encounter a couple of years later? Which said, the two films share a study of passion; this one's theme, though, is strangulation, never a possibility on that railway-station platform.

Sometimes deemed a second-string number, Wanted for Murder is in fact a great example of the way in which character actors – even Stanley Holloway (and off-screen wife) - could portray stolid Scotland Yard figures who find themselves caught up in a fatal, even Greek kinkfest.

It gives nothing away to say that cigar enthusiast Eric Portman, troubled grandson of a Victorian hangman, is the strangler of women in London nights. The plot turns upon his being tracked, and captured. We can, of course, be sure that he will not escape, but...

Here is another glorious portrayal of post-war London, within and without, which transcends the classes not in fact felled by the seemingly seismic 1945 Election.

Nothing is ever set in stone, or even wax: a couple of crucial scenes to treasure are a be-whiskered Wilfrid Hyde-White as a sleepy night-guard at the Chamber of Horrors (does anybody still go there?).

And, at the same time, across the Atlantic, no less a reviewer than James Agee praised “some beautifully exciting shots of Hyde Park as a police cordon clears away the rattled crowds and closes, through the twilight, for the kill”.

Those involved in creating this film are often deemed lesser lights but their efforts brought us a masterpiece.

The Title Isn't Kidding. - Wanted for Murder review by NC

This feels like one of those pretty average B films churned out by the likes of Butcher's, with an extra forty minutes tacked on, improving it not a stitch. There is no discernible departure from the routine serial killer/police investigation format; the script, even with Rodney Ackland involved, is no better than competent, and often not even that; and the direction and the production plays safe by enclosing the enterprise in a conventional straightjacket. Good acting may have raised it a level or two, but the mostly second division stars don't seem to try very hard. Before the climax, Eric Portman is allowed to show his 'Hyde' character once only, in a good scene at Madame Tussauds. For the rest of the time he gives a fair impression of a monolith. Dulcie Gray and Derek Farr are hardly first choices if you want charisma in your leads. Stanley Holloway is there presumably to add a light touch. Trouble is he's as amusing as mumps. Only Roland Culver, as the police Inspector, looks assured. The ending isn't worth sitting through the rest of the film for.