Green for Danger

I have staretd a new category, Classic Films, in which this is the first post. My main aim here will be to share some of my favourite films, a lot of which, like this first, will date from the 1930’s and 1940’s

The Cast

Leo Genn – Mr. Eden
Henry Edwards – Mr Purdy
Trevor Howard – Dr. Barnes
Ronald Adam – Dr. White
Alastair Sim – Inspector Cockerill
George Woodbridge – Det-Sgt. Hendricks
Judy Campbell – Sister Bates
Wendy Thompson – Sister Carter
Moore Marriott – Joseph Higgins
Sally Gray – Nurse Linley
Rosamund John – Nurse Sanson
Meg Jenkins – Nurse Woods

Plot Synopsis

Murder in a hospital! And the hospital itself is unusual, a lovely Tudor mansion with gigantic old beams and timbered floors, oak-panelled walls and flagged passageways. In the beautiful grounds are a weir stream and a topiary hedge, a long shrub-covered pergola and rock garden with such a profusion of flowers as only a great English estate can show. It is in fact, an emergency wartime hospital near London.

Higgins, a postman who is also a light rescue worker, is brought in as a flying bomb casualty. The surgeon, Mr. Eden, makes his examination. “We’ll operate at ten o’clock, Nurse,” he tells Nurse Sanson. At ten o’clock the operating theatre is ready. The steaming instruments have been taken from the steriliser, the great shadowless lights are switched on. Sister Bates, masked and gloved, gives a last look round; the patient is wheeled in; the anaesthetist starts up his machine. Suddenly, inexplicably, there is tragedy, the patient dies on the operating table. All those present are bewildered – and suspicious. Then, because she stumbles on evidence that the patient was murdered, Sister Bates is stabbed to death.

Inspector Cockrill, an ominously whimsical fellow, is called from Scotland Yard to investigate the crimes. He finds that each of five suspects has a strong motive for murder. Nurse Freddie Linley is one. Another is Dr. Barnes, the anaesthetist, with whom she is in love. There is also the woman-weary surgeon, Mr. Eden. The others are Nurses Sanson and Woods. The Inspector’s dry cross examination fails to trap the criminal.

Is Nurse Sanson the most likely suspect? “Obviously she couldn’t have done it,” Dr. Barnes protests warmly. Is it one of the doctors? The inspector finds Barnes and Eden fighting with Nurse Sanson an interested spectator. “We might perhaps arrange a future contest in aid of some deserving charity,” the inspector comments.

Eventually he decides to carry his investigations into the operating theatre. He stages a mock operation with the five suspects in attendance: Eden, Barnes, and the three nurses. Nerves are frayed, but each is determined to give nothing away to the watchful inspector. The ‘operation’ begins. Every detail of the postman’s death is carefully reconstructed. By this grim experiment, Cockrill proves that the crime was carried out by repainting cylinders of lethal gas normally coloured green – to resemble oxygen cylinders. And the murderer is dramatically revealed.

A Little more Detail

Adapted from the novel by Christianna Brand, one of her humorous whodunits featuring Inspector Cockrill of the Kent County Police, Green For Danger. The story, and its protagonist, are considerably altered from Brand’s original in this 1947 film.

Originally set in a military hospital during the Blitz in 1941, the film relocates the action to a civilian emergency hospital during the doodlebug campaign of 1944. The major changes in Gilliat and Claude Guerney’s screenplay, however, were reserved for the main character. Although Launder and Gilliat made a number of thrillers over the years, Gilliat disliked whodunits, and hoped to largely remove that element from the plot, but Brand’s original story was too carefully constructed to survive without it. Their solution, as Gilliat later recalled, was to “make capital of the very clichés of the detective novel”.

To this end they structured the screenplay so that the first third set up the mystery in a traditional fashion, though undercutting it somewhat with a wry voice-over. When Inspector Cockrill arrives, most of the viewer’s assumptions, about the characters and the mystery genre, start to unravel.

They turned Cockrill into the narrator and cast the comic actor Alastair Sim in the role. The film subtly guys the whole genre, with the Inspector frequently proved wrong and even partly responsible for the last death. In one priceless scene, he smugly turns to the last page of a mystery novel to find that he has incorrectly guessed the identity of the murderer.

This film is a wonderfully atmospheric British film of the period with a remarkable mixture of sly comedy and genuine thrills, with the sardonic and sarcastic humour of the protagonist providing a good counterpoint to the darkly atmospheric surroundings of the hospital – shot with considerable panache by Launder and Gilliat’s regular cameraman Wilkie Cooper. This is seen at its best in the night-time sequence in which the various characters roam around the hospital grounds before one of them meets her end at the hands of a spectral murderer dressed in a surgical gown. Except for two establishing shots at the beginning of the story, the film was shot entirely inside Pinewood studios, including all the ‘exteriors’. The result is probably Gilliat’s most visually accomplished and controlled film as director.

This is a film that is very much worth watching if only for Alastair Sim’s magnificent (as one coms to expect) performance as Inspector Cockrill.

Update:

I have since discovered that Alistair Sim was one of Edinburgh’s famous sons.