A temporarily sightless Pelley (literally) stumbles across a murder victim, and is knocked cold for his pains. Once his sight is restored, spends his time solving the mystery.
This movie rattles along at a fair pace, and is well photographed. Acting performances are a bit variable, some distractingly so. The sound quality was a bit poor in places, and the print that had been digitised had suffered a fair amount of damage in a few places. Neither of these things were bad enough to spoil the film for me though.
It is easy enough to poke holes in a film of this type; made as a 'B' movie with limited time and budget, together with the World being a different place back then, a film like this might not make much sense to many viewers today.
Lovely Dinah Sheridan puts in a good performance but Maxwell Reed -playing a proto-Templar type role- seems somewhat wooden (his quips and one liners fall flat where Templar's wouldn't have quite) and his accent is just a bit weird. Reed hailed from Northern Ireland originally, so was perhaps unlikely to speak with an entirely conventional accent, but here there is a somewhat forced twang to it that is further west than Ireland even.
Almost any native English speaker is liable to find his accent a bit strange I think; what we most clearly hear are always the differences from the way we speak ourselves, so whilst any Brit is going to notice a mid-Atlantic element, the end result is inevitably going to be disowned by anyone who is from North America.
If anyone is confused by 'the generator': Back then, it wasn't unusual for larger houses out in the countryside to lack mains electricity; my father grew up in such a house; they had electric lighting, but only when the generator (in an outhouse) was running.
Scenes of London and the home counties circa 1950 have a charm all of their own, and things I took for granted when I was growing up (such as almost everyone smoking, nearly all the time) seem increasingly strange in these times of ours.
Also strikingly odd are the hairstyles; Reed's Brycreemed mound -along with his hat- appears to mysteriously survive the initial accident, plus various beatings up, fights, sundry cranial surgery etc, without anything more than the odd hair out of place. In one scene his hairdo competes with Simmonds' curly creation for 'biggest distraction', courtesy of the lighting which if anything was set to accentuate these absurd coiffures.
But if you can see past these things and take the film on its own terms I think it is well worth watching.
This movie rattles along at a fair pace, and is well photographed. Acting performances are a bit variable, some distractingly so. The sound quality was a bit poor in places, and the print that had been digitised had suffered a fair amount of damage in a few places. Neither of these things were bad enough to spoil the film for me though.
It is easy enough to poke holes in a film of this type; made as a 'B' movie with limited time and budget, together with the World being a different place back then, a film like this might not make much sense to many viewers today.
Lovely Dinah Sheridan puts in a good performance but Maxwell Reed -playing a proto-Templar type role- seems somewhat wooden (his quips and one liners fall flat where Templar's wouldn't have quite) and his accent is just a bit weird. Reed hailed from Northern Ireland originally, so was perhaps unlikely to speak with an entirely conventional accent, but here there is a somewhat forced twang to it that is further west than Ireland even.
Almost any native English speaker is liable to find his accent a bit strange I think; what we most clearly hear are always the differences from the way we speak ourselves, so whilst any Brit is going to notice a mid-Atlantic element, the end result is inevitably going to be disowned by anyone who is from North America.
If anyone is confused by 'the generator': Back then, it wasn't unusual for larger houses out in the countryside to lack mains electricity; my father grew up in such a house; they had electric lighting, but only when the generator (in an outhouse) was running.
Scenes of London and the home counties circa 1950 have a charm all of their own, and things I took for granted when I was growing up (such as almost everyone smoking, nearly all the time) seem increasingly strange in these times of ours.
Also strikingly odd are the hairstyles; Reed's Brycreemed mound -along with his hat- appears to mysteriously survive the initial accident, plus various beatings up, fights, sundry cranial surgery etc, without anything more than the odd hair out of place. In one scene his hairdo competes with Simmonds' curly creation for 'biggest distraction', courtesy of the lighting which if anything was set to accentuate these absurd coiffures.
But if you can see past these things and take the film on its own terms I think it is well worth watching.