Restored in 4K in 2026 by Hammer Films at Silver Salt Restoration laboratory, from the original 35mm elements. Note written for the world premiere at Il Cinema Ritrovato. — EK
What at first seems to be a genteel story of an Englishwoman abroad being driven around in an antique Rolls-Royce by the Mediterranean Sea – all in calm, saturated Eastmancolor – is in fact a coldly executed heist plot that descends into murder.
A wounded criminal at large hides in a dark, semi-derelict beach house whose reclusive, alcoholic English expat resident he takes hostage to his whims. Joseph Losey’s familiar power games, as demonstrated in The Sleeping Tiger (1954) and expanded on in The Servant (1963), are the main source of interest here as the ruthless murderer starts making contemptuous assumptions about the man’s past: is he a former playboy down on luck? A failed poet? A disgraced surgeon?
Scripted as his debut by the innovative writer and future Hammer director Jimmy Sangster, the film perfectly fits into Hollywood-exile Losey’s thematic fascination with identity concealment, escape, and cruelty (burning a poetry manuscript to make a fire is the strongest evocation of the man’s inherent violence). The film cannot be viewed but as a metaphor of life and healing in exile by the most modern of blacklisted American directors. What is odd about this short film is that for the first time in a post-Hollywood work by Losey his real name, and not his pseudonym, appears in the credits – the same wouldn’t happen in the feature films he made until 1957’s Time Without Pity. This was most probably due to the freedoms a small studio such as Hammer could enjoy.
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