Rent No Exit (1936)

Crimes and Whispers - No Exit review by CH

“Let's be fashionable and make it a trunk murder!” So says Billy Milton to Leslie Perrins a dozen minutes or so into No Exit (1936). The latter is a crime novelist informed by a critic outside a theatre that he has no grasp of modern police methods; to this end, the riled Perrins soon suggests to a man-about-town friend that he conceal him, Milton, for a month with the intention of showing up flummoxed Scotland Yard as fools.

The pair fashion a plot, which indeed turns around a substantial trunk – just as it had in Graham Greene's under-rated novel It's a Battlefield. Inspired by real life, that was the only one which Greene had deliberately written with a film in sight; alas, it has never been made. (For his trouble he was, surreally, accused thirty years ago by biographer Michel Shelden of being the actual Brighton Trunk Murderer.) If No Exit is no match for that putative film, it exists, it survives - and proves to be diverting stuff.

And boldly so, for Milton is in thrall to a young married woman Valerie Hobson who is not averse to the situation and so smitten as to leave upon blotting paper... Add to this a canny novice detective (who had been thrashed by Perrins at Charterhouse) and a bumbling local reporter – and several scenes in which Perrins bluffs his way through questioning while inadvertently scattering clues as Milton cowers in a cupboard or loft: capacious hideaways after a journey in the trunk whose dripping bottle of port leaves traces mistaken for blood.

As far as the plot goes, we can leave it there as glorious hokum – but then a phrase leaps from the screen, a reference to “the third man”. Which makes one wonder whether Greene could have reviewed the film.

He did not do so.

So that on-the-hoof theory falls as flat as his being the trunk murderer.

Such films as No Exit are often accused of being “stagey”. It was based upon a play by George Goodchild and Frank Witty, and has sidelights upon theatre in the Thirties, with some self-referential gags about the movies, but it stands in its own right as what Greene would have termed an “entertainment”. In any case, these films are, at least, a record of plays that one is never likely to see again upon a stage.

That said, an amateur group could have a Christmas hit if it seeks out the original play.