The Dark Road

I think the film makers thought they had an interesting way to frame a story here: set it as a reporter pitching a feature to his editor, with frequent voice-overs, discussing the motivations of the lead character, a minor crook who rises from car theft to jewel thief, with frequent spells in prison, punctuated by escape. Unfortunately, it winds up telling the audience, rather than showing them what is going on, and that rather telegraphically.

Director Alf Goulding -- given his full first name of Alfred to celebrate his rise from slapstick comedy, no doubt -- offers a couple of comedy bits to eke out the film's meager length, but between the obvious cheapness of the sets and the mediocre talent of the actors, there isn't much worthwhile. It's possible that the camera-work was better than I could judge, but the print I saw was too dark to reveal much detail.

This is a rather perp!exing film.It starts off quite reasonably but then descends quickly to mediocrity.It has a rather odd framing device of an editors office in an American newspaper office.To add to the unsatisfactory nature of the narrative is the Mora!using voice over,which carries on right through the film.So it promises more than it delivers.

After seeing this Z production, I fetched Alfred Goulding's filmography, mostly short movies, and no title ringing me a bell. The production is completely poor, the settings are inexistant, and in some scenes, we see the actor speaking from the back. And the must of this junk movie is the escape from jail, amazingly cheap, and far opposite to Bresson who was really precise. Now, I must recommend a true jewel thief movie, "The great jewel robber", with threatening David Brian as the thief, a real higher dimension, only two years later.

Anybody curious as to what Alfred J. Goulding made apart from the Laurel & Hardy picture 'A Chump at Oxford' should be aware of this potboiler hailing from the days long ago before Hammer traveled to Transylvania when they visited the even more exotic location of London at the time of postwar austerity where Michael Ripper played a zoot-suited, greasy-haired, spiv resembling a crook from a Childrens Film Foundation production and Sydney Bromley before he grew his beard in this cheap copy of 'No Orchids for Miss Blandish' full of limeys trying to sound American which if anything achieves the feat of being even more stilted and unreal than the original.

THE DARK ROAD is an early crime drama from Hammer Films that also marks Michael Ripper's first role in a Hammer production, although it is a very small one. This is one of those criminal biopics that were all the rage in the late 1940s, probably inspired by the interest in BRIGHTON ROCK. The film follows the criminal career of a true-life crook who begins a life of crime early on and ends up getting involved in all kinds of scrapes. There are femme fatale accomplices, plucky American journalists, jail breaks and all manner of swindles and robberies along the way. Although it's a little prescriptive in its style of presentation, I found this engaging fare.