The Hidden Room
Oct. 13th, 2024 07:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo YouTube inserted a movie called The Hidden Room into my feed. Never heard of it. But the title was irresistible because If something is hidden I dearly want to find it. The Hidden Room is a British movie, directed by Edward Dmytryk- on the run from a prison sentence after being brutalised by the HUAC. It stars Robert Newton- with his unfathomably dark eyes- playing it svelte ansd straight. The Hidden Room is the US title. The British title is Obsession which isn't half as good. The screenplay is by Alec Coppel from his own play and novel. Coppel also wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's Vertigo.
Supporting players are Sally Gray- once the "British Ginger Rogers" and later an Irish peeress- and Naunton Wayne- best remembered as one half of the pair of cricket-obsessed twits in The Lady Vanishes. Here he's the admirably laid-back police inspector. The year is 1949, the place London and the hidden room is accessed via a bomb site.
Newton is going to commit the perfect murder- and it's worth one and a half hours of anybody's time to find out if he manages to pull it off.
Supporting players are Sally Gray- once the "British Ginger Rogers" and later an Irish peeress- and Naunton Wayne- best remembered as one half of the pair of cricket-obsessed twits in The Lady Vanishes. Here he's the admirably laid-back police inspector. The year is 1949, the place London and the hidden room is accessed via a bomb site.
Newton is going to commit the perfect murder- and it's worth one and a half hours of anybody's time to find out if he manages to pull it off.
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Date: 2024-10-13 06:57 am (UTC)I love this movie so much. I discovered it in 2011. I don't think I've seen it since, but I still love it.
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Date: 2024-10-13 07:41 am (UTC)Coppel was Australian and Dmytryk American so what we're getting is an outsiders angle on post-War Britain. I particularly love those scenes in the Club with the old buffers obsessing about the"Empire" they still think of as a reality.
And, yeah, all the actors are rather wonderful. I hadn't come across Phil Brown before and I love how his character grows in stature so that by the end he's giving Newton as good as he gets. And Sally Gray- again previously unknown to me- pulls off the icy femme fatale to a T. Wikipedia says she could have been a big star if she'd chosen to go down that route but instead she married her peer.....
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Date: 2024-10-13 06:25 pm (UTC)Yes! I have mostly seen him otherwise in small character parts from the '40's. He moved to the UK when he was blacklisted. Very popular choice.
And Sally Gray- again previously unknown to me- pulls off the icy femme fatale to a T.
I saw her first in They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), but my memory is that Griffith Jones steals that movie.
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Date: 2024-10-13 09:34 am (UTC)Still remember him as Long John Silver in that kids' series when I was young.