The Third Visitor moves along at a fair-paced clip , with acting honors to Sonia Dresdel – a singular actress whose unusual angular features and raven-like manner clutch and hold the camera's attention. (She played the hissable Mrs. Baines in The Fallen Idol (1948). One critic said that she had "a real power to take an audience by the wrist and give them the works. She had terrific personality and was terribly underused and misused. She would have been the Lady Macbeth of all Lady Macbeths.")
Mr. Richard Carling (Karel Stepanek), a superior sort of gent who had apparently graduated with honors from some Central European school of sneering, has various people, including an American gangster and a mysterious woman, call on him one evening at his isolated mansion. The next day a corpse, identified as his, is discovered, and a police detective (Drew Middleton), an Inspector Japp/Lestrade clone, complete with bushy mustache, rumpled raincoat and a carefully cultivated vagueness, goes nosing around to find the killer. He bumps heads with the sort of characters who inhabited British melodramas of the '40s and '50s, including the witch-like Steffy Millington (Sonia Dresdel) and her daffy hubby, Bill Millington (Colin Gordon), a couple with an unexpected supply of light-hearted Noel Cowardish banter; a sour-looking blonde, Vera Kurton (Eleanor Summerfield), and her pleasantly bland husband, Jack Kurton (Hubert Gregg), who exchange salvos rather than words; and a weirdo with the charisma of a talking fungus (Michael Martin Harvey). These folks scuttle in and out of view for an hour and a half, dropping clues for the industrious Inspector to scoop up and make sense of. Chaired skillfully by the incredible Maurice Elvey, who directed nearly 200 British films between 1913 and 1957, The Third Visitor is a remarkably satisfying little crime drama with a plot that twists and turns, keeping you guessing right to the neatly unexpected finale. Filmed in black and white, in the austere setting of post- war Britain (some of the scenery would seem to have been borrowed from the original stage play), it's a semi noir, wholly crafty 90- minute mystery masterpiece, all the more satisfying because I had never heard of it.
