Paramount offered Lang this Graham Greene adaptation, and he was keen... But then hated Seton Miller's screenplay interpretation of it. I don't know why - I think it's terrific fun, has an outstanding beginning... A clock. Ray Milland emerges from an asylum and attends a village fete, where the clairvoyant gives him the weight of the cake. Despite objections, he takes it away with him and shares it with a blind man on a train (Eustace Wyatt, for the record), who isn't blind, and who then assaults him during an air raid, stealing the cake...
Marjorie Reynolds is the appealing Austrian he bumps into, Carl Esmond her brother. Then we have lazy PI Erskine Sandford, seance thrower Hillary Brooke, Inspector Percy Waram, Dan Duryea (sporting an enormous and threatening pair of tailor scissors!) and Alan Napier.
Music by Victor Young, photographed by Henry Sharp.
We've seen Reynolds in the Mitchum film
His Kind of Woman (1951)... otherwise, it's tons of B movies.
It's got a wacky, dream-like feel to it - those big scissors and weird door bell exemplify it.
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