A Convenient Location for Many Murders

In 1935's The Riverside Murder, Alastair Sim was more Scottish than I've heard him at any other time. As a police sergeant on a crime scene, he expels a snooping reporter and when she calls him a monster he replies, "Aye, from Loch Ness!" It's Sim's debut film and a decent, engaging little murder mystery.

The main stars of the film are Basil Sydney and Judy Gunn, as a police inspector and the reporter, respectively. What is it about the tension between cop and reporter that has continually yielded satisfying sexual tension? I suppose it's because they're both after the same thing and at any moment they can switch between being allies or foes or back again. There's a mildly S&M quality to it and appropriately the film features a scene where the reporter is handcuffed for being too much in the way. She screams and jumps up and down when a rival reporter snaps her photo and her disgrace is later shown to be on the front page.

She is clearly "in sensation". When her co-worker shows her the article she infers cautiously that the boss has, "seen it, of course?" To which her co-worker replies, "And he wouldn't need glasses!"

There's lots of quick, cute bits of dialogue like that. The mystery itself is a tidy little thing about a group of friends who long ago entered into a pact of some kind together. Now they're being picked off one by one by the murderer, who might be one of them. Most of the action takes place in the first dead man's large house where the housekeeper continues serving tea however trying the situation becomes.

Sim is easily the standout with his bizarre, ghoulish appearance and that great voice, all in the service of being a mildly helpful subordinate. It's not hard to see why he found success in a string of detective roles. The Riverside Murder is available on Amazon Prime.

The Good Old Faith in the New

There are a number of ways 1955's Escapade is eerily resonant to-day: it features a writer whose aggressively proselytised philosophy for peace continually has the opposite of its intended effect, it features a school shooting, and it features a rumination on the idea that it'll be children who advance humanity in the cause of peace after chucking the paralysing systems of the old. The resonances aren't always for the best, though, as the decades following the film's release emphasis the hopeless naivete of its ideas and the sentimentality in their expressions. But some of the dialogue is really clever and performances by leads John Mills, Yvonne Mitchell, and Alastair Sim elevate the material considerably.

Mills and Mitchell play Mr. and Mrs. Hampden, a couple with three children who attend a boarding school where the headmaster, Dr. Skillingworth, is played by Alastair Sim. The film really isn't a comedy--maybe it was intended to be but it's never especially funny. But Sim here is playing a slightly more contemplative version of headmaster characters he played in comedies throughout the 50s.

In the Hampden household, the kids are kept awake by the noisy arguments from downstairs in the meetings for pacifism organised by Mr. Hampden. Constantly in a rage and eager to hold forth on politics at all times, he barely seems to notice that Mrs. Hampden is growing distant and cold. He notices but doesn't quite have the presence of mind to pay attention when she laughs after he's held forth on the importance for women to feel like they're considered valuable contributors to conversation.

Meanwhile, at school, Skillingworth is trying to uncover some kind of conspiracy among the boys. When eventually one of the boys shoots a professor it turns out to be a diversion from their real intent--the episode is played for laughs in a way you can only have in a movie made in a time and place where school shootings are rare or non-existent. It turns out the kids have a really improbable, and improbably altruistic, plan that plays off the fact that one of the Hampden kids is named Icarus, a creative decision from the screenwriters that feels increasingly too broad as the film goes on.

As wrong as the movie ends up being in so many things, its basic intentions and ideals are all the more appreciable. This scene has an especially bittersweet quality to-day:

Apparently Escapade was never released on VHS or DVD. You can watch the whole movie on YouTube here.