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This dark Ealing melodrama is about two very different houses in Victorian Brighton. The first is a pub in which Googie Wither’s calculating landlady Pearl Bond (with her winsomely wicked glance) spies a way of getting rid of her boozy husband to clear the path for her lover; the second is the starchy home of Mervyn John’s respectable, pompous little chemist Edward Sutton, a man in public office as an analyst for the courts. However, the cost of his self-righteous attitude to propriety (‘love and fear are inseparable’ he says) is that he is deceived on all sides by his children, and his naïve son – Gordon Jackson in an early role, tasting independence in the form of tuppence of whisky in Pearl’s pub – unwittingly becomes the dupe of her low cunning.

Unsurprisingly, coming from the director of Kind Hearts and Coronets, there is more than a dash of cynicism about proceedings here, with Hamer thoroughly undermining platitudes as 'there's no place like home' and 'the Lord will provide'. It's another welcome addition to the films of director Robert Hamer available on dvd (and there's another one lurking in the John Mills Centenary Collection Volume 2 if you look for it, the 1952 film, The Long Memory).

 

Graeme Hobbs on 31st March 2008
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