Ann Sears calls on Hilton Edwards at his request. Her father had been hanged for murder during a jewelry robbery twenty years ago. Now her mother has just died. Edwards is here to collect the jewelry. Miss Sears says she does not know anything about any jewelry. Edwards becomes threatening, and she pushes him off. He falls onto the floor, hitting his head on the mantel. The next thing Miss Sears knows, Lee Patterson is talking to her about getting rid of the corpse. Eventually they flee to her home, where he starts out wheedling and ends up threatening.
Paul Rotha's movie has a dreamlike, nightmarish quality to it, as circumstances and people push Miss Sears in one direction or the other, and she goes along, helpless and knowing it, powerless to do anything about it. Perhaps that quality is derived from John Creasey's source novel. He once described his method as "I've no idea ahead of time what will develop. The plot and any other ideas all happen simultaneously in the - if you'll forgive the pompous phrase - in the act of creation as it were. None of it is easy."
Well, it seems to have worked for Creasey, who wrote something between 500 and 600 books. That sounds nightmarish to me, and Rotha has certainly captured that quality in his movie.
