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After opening titles of sinister hypnotic music and swirling water, we're in a London apartment where Michael Cornforth, a writer, (Griffiths Jones) is making ready for bed. The next morning when he awakes he's not only fully dressed and in a completely different place in the sticks – he's also holding a gun! After a bewildered nosey round the gaff, this being a black and white second feature, he of course finds a dead body - in the kitchen. Two Rank charm school types, Jean (played by Patricia Laffan) a bossy nosey parker type certainly, a lesbian possibly – and Marian, a beautiful trance like possibly drug addicted living doll – call round on, of all things, a walking holiday. They're soaked to the skin (it is, after all ,raining) and seeking shelter. This being Britain in the 1950, Cornforth can't tell them to do one so he only goes and lets them in doesn't he. After lots of farcical trying to keep them out of the kitchen stuff while not appearing to be totally odd - and Jean informing Cornforth that her friend is "very nervy and imaginative – always expecting to find bodies under the bed" - Marian upsets the Saxa salt and one textbook scream later discovers the corpse. Not unnaturally the two girls try and bail out. Cornforth prevents this at gunpoint – and then things begin to get really silly. He wants to talk to Jean who then simply goes off with him for a nice chat while leaving Marian in the bedroom without explanation like a naughty child. Cornforth says he can prove he was in London last night as his neighbour Mungo Jerry – or Peddy – saw him. Jean then goes from "You murdered him (not Mungo) didn't you?" to "I can take care of Marian. No one believes her anyway" in the blink of an eye. Why I'm not sure. It can't be Cornforth's charisma. Later on Jean informs Cornforth that she's had Marian sent to hospital. "They've got her under heavy sedation. She'll be out for 24 hours." With friends like that?

All in all Hidden Homicide – in terms of characterisation, plotting and probability - charters new waters of terribleness even by the standards of the British black and white 1950s B movie.

Clyde, a poor boy whose mother runs a home for the needy, attains a job as a bell hop. From the very first he wants more; he's trying to break a date to see a ritzy dame who has taken a shine to him carrying her bags. Ma don't approve of his new friends though – "Boys and girls like that are the only friends I've got" – and after he's involved in a drink driving accident he sets out for New York (Mum's praying here is ludicrous. A sentimental note out of keeping with von Sternberg films.)

Now Clyde has risen to foreman of the stamping department in his uncle's Samuel Griffiths collar and shirt factory. These are the best scenes of the film – the depth in the composition of the shots is incredible – with the girls squeaking away on their stampers and flicking their hair as Clyde walks passed.

Sylvia Sydney catches his eye and is very Dietrich like in her mockingly wry approach to Clyde with "I hope you like the collar business" and "You really seem happy Mr. Griffiths" as he pulls a sulk when she won't let him come to her room. If it's not the sensual sound of the water – the film is divided into chapters with dream-like, ominous shots of the water – it's the sound of the girls stamping away, all examples of von Sternberg recording sound in an artificial manner. Listen to the bit where the newsboy is chanting "bad results of accident."

Most of which von Sternberg directs in a perfunctory manner. He isn't interested in the effect that social conditions have on people's motivations/ actions (surely the theme of the book). In his films, people are only roused from their world weary inertia because of their own feelings.

In short, von Sternberg is unsuited to the material. With such an unwieldy novel to film there are too many scenes where he simply points the camera at the actors (like almost every other director does) in boring scenes necessary for plot advancement. Compare this with the contemporaneous Shanghai Express, a film conceived and written by von Sternberg which never fails to be visually compelling, and the Scarlett Empress whose visual quality is unprecedented, perhaps in the whole of cinema.