Le perceur de coffres

Quite an enjoyable second feature, although the star actor was too old for the Colley Dawson role. Reliable support from character actors like Ernest Clark and Victor Maddern.

It's 1938 London. Locksmith Colley Dawson (Ray Milland) demonstrates his safecracking skills to get a job designing a foolproof safe. He gets recruited by a crooked antiques dealer to break into a safe. Eventually, he gets caught and imprisoned. After the start of the war, he gets recruited by the military to steal a German spy list from a safe in occupied Belgium.

This is fine. I wouldn't spend that much time introducing Colley's descend into the criminal world. The movie could easily start with training at the military base. That's the meat of the story anyways. The training has some fun bits and dropping behind the lines has some good action. It has some good sneaking around but the scheme always has an unavoidable issue. The Nazis would always find out no matter how careful they are. The Nazis would assume that something was stolen and the list seems to be a high priority. I like a lot of this but much of the first half can be cut.

This low budget 'B' is the third of five films directed by and starring Ray Milland. To say that these five represent a mixed bag would be an understatement but this one is by far the most interesting.

The story itself is involving and the title character provides a perfect vehicle for Mr. Milland's rakish persona.

The pacing and momentum are pretty good compared to this director's other films but that quite frankly would not be difficult. He has the plus factors here of editor Ernest Walter, cinematographer Gerry Gibbs and a first rate score by Richard Rodney Bennett not to mention a supporting cast of familiar and thoroughly dependable British thesps notably Barry Jones and Victor Maddern. Nice performance too from Prague-born Jeanette Sterke who did not alas make as many films as her looks and talent deserved.

Mr. Milland returned to England ten years later to direct and reprise his stage role of Simon Crawford QC in the pedestrian 'Hostile Witness' of which the less said the better.

The safecracker is in the Army. He looks at the bed and complains about the thin mattress. The soldier asks him what did he sleep on before. Safecracker says, "on a double bed with a double mattress". Soldier says, "you must have been in the American Army". To the British, "Yanks are Over Sexed, Over Paid, and Over Here".

This was fairly entertaining, but odd. It is like three distinct movies - a crime film followed by a light comedy and closed out with a war picture. There are several plot points that were not well developed and that leave you filling in some gaps yourself - and not in the "I'm glad they didn't just spoon feed it to me" way, but in the "wait - what the heck just happened there?" way. The story was interesting enough but it all stayed pretty superficial. Wasn't a waste of time but won't watch it again.