Landslide

That film preservation moves in mysterious ways shows in the pristine print of this incredibly obscure quota quickie aired in the small hours this morning on Talking Pictures. Even this is historically interesting, however, since it stars Jimmy Handley & Dinah Sheridan when they were just teenagers, five years before they married.

Donovan Pedelty's films were usually set in Ireland, but for a change this one's set in Wales (not that you'd know it from the accents of most of the cast, who are obviously as Welsh as the dance troupe they're members of, 'The Famous Orientals', are authentically Chinese).

Describing it as a mystery-thriller is already a spoiler, since for the first third of it's already short running time it seems more like a revue film (and includes a cod Victorian melodrama about a dastardly mine-owner called Jasper Johns, which I hope doesn't lead to any careless researchers claiming the nonegenarian pop artist was once a child actor).

Although people get murdered by a maniac and buried in a landslide (thirty years before Aberfan) nobody in the film seems particularly perturbed by either, and it all sounds far more dramatic that it actually is to watch. The climactic fracas when the killer is eventually almost casually unmasked is so ineptly staged it's fascinating.