Rent Suspected Person (1942)
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- After a $50,000 heist in New York, two of the suspected robbers walk free from the courtroom and they waste no time in heading to London in search of the missing loot. This means bad news for their former accomplice Jim Raynor (Clifford Evans), who has the money hidden away - not least because they're not the only ones on his tail; Scotland Yard is also on the case...
- Actors:
- Clifford Evans, Patricia Roc, David Farrar, Anne Firth, Robert Beatty, Eric Clavering, Leslie Perrins, Eliot Makeham, John Salew, William Hartnell, Martin Benson, Terry Conlin, Anthony Shaw
- Directors:
- Lawrence Huntington
- Producers:
- Warwick Ward
- Writers:
- Lawrence Huntington
- Studio:
- Network
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama, Thrillers
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Reviews (1) of Suspected Person
A Trunkful of Dollars - Suspected Person review by CH
Exchange Clifford Evans for Humphrey Bogart, keep his sister (Patricia Roc) and sweetheart singer (Anne Firth) - if they could both affect an America accent - transplant the action to San Francisco or Chicago, and Suspected Person (1942) could well be something that the French would acclaim as classic noir.
As it is, this English-made film is routinely dismissed as a B-venture, which in unfair for all concerned. Written and directed by Lawrence Huntington, it gets much into less than an hour and a quarter. Newspapers' front pages speed events along from the very opening, when a New York paper splashes (as they say) on two gangsters for whom there were insufficient grounds for prosecution after $50,000 was stolen. Others were involved - and did a bunk to London with the proceeds. One is swiftly seen off in front of a Thirties mantlepiece (the whole film is a small study in interior design) but it turns out, dishonour among thieves, that he had been relieved of the greenbacks by Evans who hankers to rescue his sister from capably running the boarding house to which circumstances have reduced her.
On his trail also comes Scotland Yard's David Farrer, assisted by a pleasingly bumbling William Hartnell (one might reflect that as the first Dr. Who his hair, what there was of it, was longer than that of The Beatles in 1963). Events traverse the suburbs, a night club (with a fetching dancer and a good song), a hotel lobby, an East End pub beside a viaduct, and a railway train with the inevitable treacherous corridor.
No scene lasts too long, there is not a moment to question the logic (what with long journeys to North Wales and back), and one can well imagine that in the midst of war all this was a diversion from whatever might be in the air above – with something of an amoral ending. As such, it is equally entertaining when, eight decades on, we do never know what is in the air a few feet above the ground.