Green for Danger (Criterion Collection)

A Scotland Yard inspector looks into odd hospital deaths during the London blitz. Directed by Sidney Gilliat.

Writer-director Sidney Gilliat isn't the household name he deserves to be, so his film Green for Danger--once an art-house perennial--qualifies as one of the major, and surely most delightful, (re)discoveries of the season. Its cunning blend of character-driven mystery, gothic dread, and inveterately English gallows humor makes for sheer movie-movie pleasure.

There's a perfect fusion of storytelling and moodmaking, plot and setting. The time is 1944, when Hitler was attacking the British populace with V-1 flying bombs. Under this ongoing siege, at an Elizabethan country manor made over as wartime hospital, someone among a half-dozen doctors and nurses is up to something sinister. Which one is anybody's guess, given the adroitly suggested crosscurrents of loathing and desire, suspicion and jealousy animating the company. After a mysterious death on the operating table, followed by a second death that's unmistakably murder, Scotland Yard enters the picture in the perversely antic form of that long drink of wormwood, the definitive Scrooge, Alastair Sim. (Actually, Sim's sepulchral voice deliciously narrates the film from the beginning.)

Gilliat, with his partner Frank Launder, had written Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (Hitch signed on after their exemplary screenplay was done) and its de facto sequel, Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich. The same talent for drollery without sacrificing tension is abundantly apparent in Green for Danger. As added inducements, the cast includes Trevor Howard and Leo Genn; the artfully shadowy cinematography is the work of Wilkie Cooper. --Richard T. Jameson