NOOSE FOR A LADY. 1953. Dennis Price as Simon Gale, Rona Anderson, Ronald Howard, Pamela Alan, Melissa Stribling. Based on the novel Whispering Woman by Gerald Verner (Wright & Brown, 1949; apparently rewritten as Noose for a Lady, Wright & Brown, 1952, based on a BBC radio dramatization of the prior novel and with Simon Gale as the new leading character). Director: Wolf Rilla. Available for viewing online here.

   A short but very effective detective mystery, that in only an hour’s running time you can pack in a lot of clues, questioning and theorizing, just like mystery novels do, and not have it bore the audience to fits of yawning and drifting off to sleep. That there a built-in urgency to the investigation on the part of Simon Gale (Dennis Price) as the amateur detective in charge doesn’t hurt at all, either.

   It seems that his cousin is in jail awaiting her hanging, having been convicted of poisoning her husband, and there is only a week to go before it happens. Working closely with her stepdaughter, Gale’s primary suspects are the small group of “friends” the dead man had. I place friends in quotes, for as his investigation goes on, they discover that each of them has secrets that the dead man had found out about and was holding the facts over their heads.

   Not for blackmail per se. He was a cruel-hearted man who merely enjoyed tormenting his victims, simply for the pleasure of it. One of them must have killed him, but who? The movie ends with one those “gather all the suspects together” scenes which have been become such cliches in old-fashioned mystery novels, but if the books can do it, why can’t the movies? And TV, of course, later on (Murder, She Wrote).

   The characterization are simply sketched in but are quite excellent portrayed, thanks to good acting, the photography very fluid and smooth, and the solution? I suppose it’s safe to say that if I figured it out, you very well may, too, but I still thought it was quite good.