A Killer Walks

The story of a good and a bad brother has long traditions in Western culture, ever since the story of Kain and Abel in the Bible.

Ned is the bad brother and Frankie is the good brother. They both live with their grandma on a farm.

Ned despises working as a farm laborer, while Frankie loves it. We mostly see Ned with a suit and tie, thus alienating himself from his brother, who we mostly see with an open shirt.

Ned has got a girlfriend from the city. She does not like a life on a farm either and dreams of having her own hair saloon.

A premise about a city femme fatal destroying the soul of a "decent" farmer was used in F.W. Murnaus silent 1927 masterpiece, "Sunrise". Ned is not decent.

Frankie is an somnambulist, and one night he shot a bull to death with his gun.

This gives Ned a diabolical idea: What about killing their granny with a knife and accuse Frankie for it. He will thus be the owner of the farm and buy a hair saloon to his beloved lady.

I have previously seen Harvey in "A Room at the Top", and I see that persona in the Ned character too.

He was really a gifted actor. His speech about "old People and death" is frightening.

He shows so much evil with his facial gestures that you get an uncanny feeling inside you.

The scene, in which he carries a knife to kill his grandma, is uncannily filmed.

Many scenes take place in the evening or at night.

I recommend this one for all lovers of British high quality crime films.

Laurence Harvey dominates this sad excuse for a motion picture, based on a play and novel but unspooling like a UK imitation of an American no-budget exploitation film. It never was theatrically released in America, for good reason: zero entertainment value.

This was before Harvey became an international star, so the film carries no marquee value. He is miscast as the older of a pair of brothers living on a farm with grandma. Relentlessly uninteresting story has Larry wanting to leave and make something of his life, especially to marry gorgeous blonde Susan Shaw, also out of place in this setting. The younger brother played by Trader Faulkner is potentially interesting, except his character is given a cliche handicap: he walks in his sleep. Hmm, could this be a hint as to some far fetched melodrama to come?\\

I lost interest quite early on, so even though the running time is under an hour the film drags on and on. Harvey's character is consistently unsympathetic and malevolent, and his habit of dressing up to go out on dates with Shaw looking like a poor version of Ray Danton in some gangster movie (years before Danton's career began) is ridiculous. Despite a forced "happy ending", the downward spiral of the movie is consistently negative, designed to turn any living, breathing audience off.

This is a complicated drama of relationships, where the knot of complications is Laurence Harvey, who is compelled to endure a life he hates, confined to a farm where he has to live with his younger brother, a helpless somnambulist, and their grandmother, who only reads the Bible. Laurence has a girl friend who is not tolerated by the grandmother, who commands Laurence to send her back to where she came from, while he insists on going out to party with her in a pub. A doctor is involved who has a taste for whisky, a good friend of the grandmother, and it is ultimately he who resolves the knot of complications. It's a tense and terse drama with rather abrupt scenes, but the psychology is very interesting and engaging, especially as the tragedy of the younger brother's helplessness in his somnambulism grows in importance to outweigh the elder brother's frustrations - who is more tragic? More could have been done of such a drama, as it is it is cut short in less than an hour, while for instance John Schlesinger could have made something great of it. As it is, it is no more than something of a sketched documentary, but with vibrant life and great acting.

Didn't anyone in the movies notice how marginally sane Laurence Harvey was in many of his roles? He certainly is here, where he and his brother, Trader Faulkner, work on the farm of their grandmother, Ethel Edwards, who never seems to realize what a tyrant she is. Faulkner is happy enough, but he is, to put it kindly, not too bright. Harvey, however, wants so much more, especially mercenary town girl Susan Shaw, so he decides that if he kills Granny with a knife and frames Faulkner, he'll be happy.

One-time screenwriter and director Ronald Drake seems to have the visuals well covered by his more experienced collaborators, but the actors don't seem up to snuff. I guess Drake knew he had to tone down the histrionics in the translation from stage to screen and muted them too far.