It's the first feature directed by Don Siegel, and has a number of interesting points: it's a locked room mystery, the last film in which Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre appeared together.
That's pretty much it for the sort of trivia that obsessives like me obsess over, unless you're fascinated by it being the latest screen adaptation of a work by Israel Zangwill, which I am not. It's clearly a minor piece, a B movie intended to see how Warners' longtime montage expert and recent Oscar winner would handle a feature. The answer is ably, apparently by letting the members of his team do their jobs. Any discussions must have taken well in advance to figure out, for example, how to combine the fog and camera placements to give that gloomy gaslight-London-by-night look a noir edge. Or maybe DP Ernest Haller, on hearing what was wanted, just rattled off what he needed, because he had done it five times before.
In the end, it's a studio production, done competently and ably by assembling a team of craftsmen, giving them a decent script, and watching the budget. Given modern ideas of film making as reinventing the wheel every time, the easy excellence on tap in Hollywood's biggest year might seem like fantasy. No: just another solid movie from the well-oiled machine.
That's pretty much it for the sort of trivia that obsessives like me obsess over, unless you're fascinated by it being the latest screen adaptation of a work by Israel Zangwill, which I am not. It's clearly a minor piece, a B movie intended to see how Warners' longtime montage expert and recent Oscar winner would handle a feature. The answer is ably, apparently by letting the members of his team do their jobs. Any discussions must have taken well in advance to figure out, for example, how to combine the fog and camera placements to give that gloomy gaslight-London-by-night look a noir edge. Or maybe DP Ernest Haller, on hearing what was wanted, just rattled off what he needed, because he had done it five times before.
In the end, it's a studio production, done competently and ably by assembling a team of craftsmen, giving them a decent script, and watching the budget. Given modern ideas of film making as reinventing the wheel every time, the easy excellence on tap in Hollywood's biggest year might seem like fantasy. No: just another solid movie from the well-oiled machine.