Mr. Denning Drives North

Somewhat under-rated British suspenser.Mills gives his usual excellent performance, and though the scene where he flies the plane doesn't come off, the film has more than enough compensations. Ending is a little hurried, but this a very watchable movie especially for we lovers of the 1950s British suspense genre.

John Mills stars in this excellent suspense picture, very reminiscent of Hitchcock, infact, you'd think it was Alfred directing this, it features some of his trademarks!

John Mills is excellent, as is the entire cast.

The screenplay in parts is a little disappointing but overall the picture works. I quite enjoyed the finale, classic stuff!

Check this film out!

This film was unintentionally hilarious.

I usually like films from this era, particularly those featuring John Mills. But this was full of wooden performances and a plot that never felt anywhere near believable.

The gypsies, who featured heavily in the story line, were as cliched as they could have been. Apart from the one that shows up at John Mills' office, who has no gypsy traits at all.

Wilfrid Hyde-White, as the mortuary attendant, was stiffer than the bodies in his graveyard.

Don't be taken in by the nondescript title, behind it lies a highly offbeat drama adapted from his own novel by the man who collaborated on the screenplay of 'Vertigo'.

When as a teenager I first read the plot précis in Gifford's 'Catalogue of British Films' I watched it wondering if he was kidding. He wasn't, and straight from the spoken credits, immediately followed by a bizarre dream sequence inhabited by people from his waking life we were plunged into a story surprisingly similar to Chabrol's 'La Femme Infidele', which had a similarly perverse but satisfying outcome with the hero, his wife and daughter bonded by the secret they now share.

Perhaps it's in part because the acting is so fine - playing characters we like, yet in a very unsavory situation - this movie stays with me these 20 or so years since I saw it on television.

This is also one of the relatively few movies before the late 1950s that I can recall that really (purport to) go out into the British countryside: The Clouded Yellow is another example - and a similar style of movie to this (and also very good). Aside from these, I can think of only the Scottish scenes in The 39 Steps, I Know Where I'm Going, How Green Was My Valley, The Stars Look Down. (Suddenly in the late 1950s/1960s, British movies exploded out of London and went a-venturing - in such as This Sporting Life, Look Back in Anger, Tunes of Glory, A Kind of Loving, Room at the Top, Billy Liar, Whistle Down the Wind, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Becket, The Lion in Winter, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Tom Jones, Get Carter, Alfie).

Like The Clouded Yellow, this is the kind of movie patented by Hitchcock - filled with psychological suspense, fast moving plot, attractive actors, physical danger, significant looks, deception.

I've never seen a video or DVD available - but it's definitely worthwhile seeing it if you get the chance (perhaps on television).