It’s a very foggy night in post-war London. Someone has been sending Meg
Elgin (Muriel Pavlow) a series of newspaper clips from the past couple of months
with photos showing her husband in the background, the final one containing the
time and date for a meeting at a train station on the back. The problem: the man
in the photos just can’t be Meg’s husband, for he went missing during the war,
presumed death, and really wasn’t the type of man who’d just disappear only to
reappear quite this mysteriously. Being engaged to be married to one Geoffrey
Leavitt (Donald Sinden) now, Meg went to the police with this, and when we first
encounter these characters, Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Luke (Christopher
Rhodes) and company have accompanied her to that train station, as has her
fiancée.
Indeed, a man looking a lot like Meg’s husband appears, but once grabbed by
the police, he turns out to be an impostor wearing a false moustache and a
jacket that once belonged to Meg’s husband. Because they don’t have anything on
him, the police let him go.
While Leavitt starts an investigation in the man all of his own, other
characters drift through the fog – a street band of dubious moral character, a
freshly escaped killer with the delectable name of Jack Havoc (Tony Wright), a
nasty middle-aged woman named Lucy Cash (Beatrice Varley) – all looking for each
other and something that’s somehow connected to Meg’s dead husband.
In theory, this fine British post-war thriller is an adaptation of a Margery
Allingham novel. Since my reading in non-noir, non-pulp crime literature is
rather spotty (and my tastes in the genre not as broad as in others), I can’t
say if it is a terribly close adaptation; it certainly does not feature Albert
Campion, the lead series character in the novel.
As some of the Allingham novels I actually
have read, the film does
find the sweet spot between being a British mystery interested in crime
literature as a way of portraying its contemporary society and the psychological
motivations of its characters, and the sort of post-war thriller quite a few
British writers excelled at. The mystery here is very deftly constructed,
managing to be at once complicated enough not to be obvious but also not so
contrived it escapes believable motivation. The latter, of course, is also the
case because the script’s just as deft at creating broad yet not shallow
characters that come to particular life through perfectly timed revelations,
marrying plot development to character depth rather wonderfully.
Staying on the script level, the film does quite a few very interesting
things. Havoc, for example, is at first portrayed as someone akin to today’s
media’s ultra-competent serial killer, a murderous shadow with near superhuman
abilities the policeman hunting him talks about in near mythological terms of
evil. Yet once the film actually starts showing us the character, this mythology
breaks down quickly, for while Havoc is certainly utterly ruthless, a killer,
and very dangerous to everyone he meets, he’s not an Evil Monster, but a man as
broken by the war and an inability to fit into the “normal” world afterwards as
at least half of the street band, who has deluded himself into believing he is
now
fated to find the treasure everyone in the film ends up hunting.
While the film never turns Havoc into an anti-hero in anything but his own
mind (which would be all wrong anyway), it does treat him and most of the other
characters from the poor side of the tracks with more empathy than you’d expect
from a British film of its era. All of this does of course also turn
Tiger
in the Smoke into as true a post-war film as many American noirs, examining
the social fallout of the war by way of a crime story, with rather existential
ideas about life lurking only a small way below the its surface.
Among the film’s other clever flourishes is the rather dry recognition that
the word “priceless” might just mean something very different to men from
different classes – as it turns out to the detriment of quite a few people who
could still be alive and somewhat happier if more precise language had been
used. No British film, after all, is ever not about class on at least some
level.
While
Tiger in the Smoke’s director Roy Ward Baker (here working as
“Roy Baker”) has made more than a few excellent films, I often found him to be
strong at telling a story effectively but very conservative in the ways he
deigned to tell it. Here, his direction is not at all conservative. Sure, there
are workmanlike, relatively static dialogue-scenes, but more often, there are
rapid, and highly effective, shifts in the editing rhythm and the amount of
camera movement as a whole, the calm scenes always threatening to break out into
expressionist close-ups of character actors’ faces, shifting to Dutch
angles with the shift of a scene’s mood, or moments the when the camera takes a
run through the dense fog. Baker’s really fantastic in using that fog too.
Particularly the film’s early scenes take on a slightly phantasmagorical quality
that suggests everything can happen in a London buried in this kind of white
shifting mass, and any kind of danger could hide in it.
Which makes the shift from foggy London not to bright Brittany and
broad daylight for the final couple of scenes particularly effective, on a
practical level but also on the more metaphorical one of everything finally
being revealed.