Watch a number of English films from the Fifties and one is not surprised to find Sam Kydd in a small part, whether a spiv or a desk sergeant, even a newspaper seller. How pleasing, then, to see The Price of Silence (1960) and find him given a chance to stretch out. Stretch is the word. He has been in gaol, and now notices, as a small-town sweet-shop owner, that a fellow prisoner (the mild-mannered Gordon Jackson) has changed his name by deed poll and shows prowess as an estate agent.
This brings dynamic to a film – the title suggests the pivotal blackmail – with a cast which includes two women who have amatory designs upon Jackson. One is his elderly employer's startlingly sultry young wife (Maya Koumani); the other June Thorburn, an artist who lives near a delapidated house Jackson has been deputed to try to sell.
From a novel by the dependable Laurence Meynell, this was directed by Montgomery Tully who made many such films. It is one of his best, bringing out to good effect such minor characters as a Councillor (Norman Shelley) whose indiscretion in a pub loses him the chance to make a killing by swinging the Planning Committee when it discusses a timber yard. One fully expects him to clasp his lapels, puff his stomach and proclaim, “don't you know who I am?”
The elements of the plot fit together plausibly, which is partly a matter of Tully's opting for a succession of jump cuts. The pace keeps up, nothing stales six decades on. In that time, June Thorburn died, pregnant, in an aeroplane crash but Maya Koumani is still alive.
In these boxes of nine-film sets, not every item is as good as this but they are invariably diverting, and there is sometimes such a surprise as The Price of Silence.