Seven Sinners

Mildly amusing scenario of US private detective and female insurance investigator battling for supremacy in solving a series of murders in Europe. Will they kiss and make up in the end? The bad guys are suitably sinister and new ones keep popping up just when you thought you had it all figured out. The script writer must have been short on inspiration as the same device of a train wreck is used no less than three times. But those action sequences are well filmed and I'd swear one of the crashing steam locomotives is the real thing.

American stars Edmund Lowe and Constance Cummings went over to Great Britain to film this Hitchcock like mystery thriller in 1936. Lowe went back to the USA, but Ms. Cummings stayed in Great Britain where she resided for the rest of her career.

Lowe is a private detective and Cummings works for an insurance company and both are trying to find a killer whose method of homicide is to either wreck trains to kill somebody or to cause a wreck to hide the body of someone he's already killed.

In a manner like Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint from North By Northwest, Lowe and Cummings exchange some very witty dialog. Other Hitchcock pictures that you will see elements of here in Seven Sinners are The Thirty Nine Steps, The Lady Vanishes, and Foreign Correspondent.

This wrecker is a pretty clever guy and it is only in the final minutes that our intrepid heroes realize who it is. And I don't think the audience will realize it either.

All that's missing is Alfred Hitchcock's portly cameo.

Ed Harwood, a wisecracking private investigator from New York, discovers a crime at an hotel in Nice during a carnival. The unraveling of the mystery which lies behind will lead him and Caryl Fenton, a female insurance agent, who will become his companion, first to Paris, then to London, later through the English countryside and finally to Southampton, in search of a criminal train wrecker.

Seven Sinners is entertaining comedy thriller in the vein of Hitchcock's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), featuring a couple who spend their time during their escapade bickering and bantering until, inevitably, they finally declare undying love. But that's only after some hectic and dangerous moments such as chases, train crashes and a shootout in a cinema-theatre at the end. There's some witty dialogue and likable performances from Lowe and Cummings,

Neil-117 is quite correct, the film makers were given permission by the Southern Railway to smash an old locomotive and carriages into a lorry on a disused branch line, hence the spectacular train crash.

I think his other comments are a little unfair. The film is taken from a play called 'The Wrecker' by Arnold Ridley (who also wrote 'The Ghost Train' and later became Private Godfrey in 'Dad's Army'). The whole point of the plot is that a serial murderer is staging train crashes to disguise his crimes.

Of course the film is dated but it's good, well-paced entertainment. If you enjoy Hitchcock's British thrillers (especially 'The Lady Vanishes', also a Launder and Gilliatt screenplay) you'll like this one.

Although Arnold Ridley is synonymous with playing bumbling old Private Godfrey in DAD'S ARMY, in the 20s and 30s he was a reasonably successful playwright writing dashing adventure stories such as this.

This is a splendid, spiffing, old style rip-roaring mystery thriller very much in the Bulldog Drummond tradition of 'boys own adventures' which were so popular in the inter-war years. It seems like about half of all English plays, books and films featured a dashing slightly eccentric hero solving crimes or saving the honour of the Empire.

The dashing debonair hero in this however is neither that dashing nor that debonair nor indeed that heroic. He's prolific American B-movie actor, Edmund Lowe - very capable but was too inconspicuous to ever be a real star. Paired with fellow American 'also ran' Constance Cummings we've not got the classic eternal screen partnership but they do have enough chemistry to fully engage us.

They're no Bogart and Bacall but they're fine enough in these well written roles and being American makes this feel a little less provincial than some 30s English films but in this instance, it's not the stars which make you want to watch it, it's the story and the witty script - the first collaboration of the soon to be legendary partnership of Gilliat and Launder. The direction is also pretty snappy - Albert de Courville was clearly very, very heavily influenced by his more famous stablemate at Gaumont-British, Alfred Hitchcock.

It's also a very classy production - Gaumont-British were famously over optimistic in their bookkeeping so were prone to splash the cash at projects - even if they didn't quite have it! Not ideal for the future financial security of Isidore Ostrer's studio but good for us viewers, all these years later.