The people behind the scenes at IMDb share their favorite movies and series of the year.

IMDb Staff Picks: Our Favorites of 2024

We followed these memorable characters through various episodes, and what a journey it’s been! Here are the top 10 Indian web series that fans couldn't stop talking about in 2024.

The Top 10 Most Popular Indian Web Series of 2024

We followed these memorable characters through various episodes, and what a journey it’s been! Here are the top 10 Indian web series that fans couldn&#39;t stop talking about in 2024.

From memorable moments to stunning red carpet looks, check out all our favorite photos of 2024.

The Year in Pictures

Scotland Yard detectives investigate the suspicious death of a rocket scientist and discover the man was being blackmailed by his secretary, who intern was threatened by foreign agents.

It starts off with a corpse thrown from a train. I assume it was a dummy. Scotland Yard are brought in to investigate and the dead man was Edward Matrion. A research engineer doing top secret government work involving the latest guided missile technology. His employer find out that one of the top secret blueprints is missing. Was Matrion engaged in selling the secret plans to an enemy country? Superintendent Duggan discover that Matrion&#39;s wife is very ill. His bank accounts show a withdrawal of a large amount of cash. Indicating that he might be being blackmailed. Also his secretary is missing, reportedly on holiday. Edgar Lustgarten regarded the case as sensational. It certainly has urgency with national security at stake. I did wonder why no alarm bells went off when Duggan was first told that secretary was on holiday.

tt0219407

The White Cliffs Mystery

This is another of the Merton park film shorts that make up the series of low budget second features which were known in British cinemas as &#39;Scotland Yard&#39; This series of film shorts were based on the files of the &#39;Scotland Yard&#39; police force in London rather that the regional ones. This one was based on the case known to the police as &#39;The Matrion Case&#39; As usual it starts with the presenter Edgar Lustgarten telling you background information to get you in the mood to watch the film. In this one he starts by talking about men travelling across the earth either above it or below it. It then goes into the story. The story opens with an express stream train travelling from Seahaven to the Waterloo station in London. On it&#39;s way there the train passes through Branton station where the body of Engineer Edward Matrion falls onto the platform dead from the moving train. Superintendent Duggan is called in to investigate as it looks like Matrion had been strangled to death. This short seems to have had more budget than usual as there are more police officers and people as well as location work at some of the train stations in London including Waterloo. Duggan finds out that before he was killed Matrion stayed in a hotel in Seahaven under the name Baylis, A dead body of his secretary Elizabeth Welton is later found off of one of the local cliffs with a lot more people around to retrieve it. The killer of both Matrion and Welton is later revealed to be middle eastern student Josef Armed.

The body of a man named Edward Matrion is thrown off a train travelling from Seahaven to Waterloo. Superintendent Duggan is on the case, and soon discovers that Matrion was an engineer, working on a guided missile project. This is one of the more interesting Scotland Yard films that I&#39;ve seen, a quite appealing storyline, solid cast, and a nice moment of fisticuffs. The obvious gripe, scenes of the body being dragged along the platform by the train looked rather good, but when they switched to the close up, they could have changed to a person, poor thing looked like he had severe rigor mortis. Worth seeing for a young Kevin Stoney, he&#39;s always great value, and Russell Napier is as steadfast as always. Lots of glorious RP accents throughout. That moment though.....I wouldn&#39;t have left those things on the train....another stupid villain. 6/10.

The Seahaven-Waterloo express roars through a lonely country station. The Station Master is horrified when he sees a body thrown out of the one of the carriages, which is carried along by the slipstream and comes to a halt with a thud against the waiting room wall. The Yard, lead by Supt Duggan (Russell Napier), are called in and the body is promptly identified as that of one Edward Matrion (Patrick Waddington). He was a research engineer engaged in top secret government work involving an advanced guided missile for Consolidated Aircraft. A search of his train carriage at Waterloo station sees his empty briefcase found hidden under a seat, but it is empty prompting concern that he may have been carrying sensitive documents that could have fallen into the wrong hands. The safe in Matrion&#39;s offices confirm that top secret blueprints for a guided missile are indeed missing. The police discover that he had drawn £800 from his bank account on the day he went to the seaside town of Seahaven. Supt Duggan and Sgt Blunt (Julian Strange) go to the genteel seaside resort and a taxi driver remembers driving Matrion to a hotel, which the two officers visit. They learn that he had hired a car from a local garage, which is thoroughly examined by forensics. They find the murdered man&#39;s fingerprints and another set belonging to as yet an unknown person. Traces of chalk on the tyres suggest that he and his unidentified passenger drove to the cliff tops where the body of a woman is subsequently discovered. She is identified as his secretary, Elizabeth Welton, after her handbag is discovered close by containing her passport and a one way ticket to France. Her fingerprints confirm that she was the passenger in Matrion&#39;s car. Meanwhile, the missing blueprints turn up at Matrion&#39;s offices and it appears that Matrion had mailed them to himself at Seahaven on the morning he made that fatal train journey. A witness comes forward and identifies a foreign student called Josef Ahmed (Michael Mellinger) as having been on the train at around the time of the murder. Ahmed is quickly traced to a lodging house in Pimlico - the same one, incidentally, as where Elizabeth Welton lived. Did the two of them know each other and did they conspire to blackmail and murder her boss? Did Ahmed then turn on her when she got cold feet, kill her and keep the money for himself? And what about the blueprints? All in all, this is a fun if standard entry in the Scotland Yard series. Like others it is pretty grisly in content in places and, for its era, it must have seemed daring. It&#39;s opening scene in which a corpse is dumped from a speeding train at a rural station is well staged and succeeds in having a horrific impact upon the audience. There is practically no humour at all in this deadly serious little whodunit in which &quot;Give us the murder, man!&quot; is very much the objective. There are some delightful period locations to look at such as Waterloo station and, although that busy terminus has changed quite a bit since then, you can still recognise the place. There is an old railway billboard visible on the concourse advertising rail fares to Bournemouth for fifteen shillings - those were the days! The b/w lighting of Bert Mason (a fine cinematographer who lit several of Anglo Amalgamated&#39;s Edgar Wallace mysteries) and Martin Curtis heightens the feeling for the mysteriousness and for place and period. The acting is more than competent all round and the assured direction is again by Montgomery Tully.

User reviews

The White Cliffs Mystery

The White Cliffs Mystery

Murder on A Train

This one's quite interesting.

Fun if standard Scotland Yard whodunit.

More from this title

More to explore

Recently viewed