Francis Searle's Cloudburst 1951

 There are several good things about Cloudburst, including leads Elizabeth Sellars as Carol Graham and Robert Preston as John Graham; it was common in low-budget British films of this period to use an available American star to improve the film's grosses in the U.S.  The film takes place in 1946 as Carol and John had helped each other in the resistance, Carol even being tortured to turn against John and refusing.  John, who continues to work in cryptology, is looking for a school for his about-to-be-born child and a lot to build a house on, when his pregnant wife is run over by two murderers on the run.  John beomes dedicated to finding the two murderers and killing them. 

This is an intelligent plot for a film noir and is written by Leo Marks, a cryptology expert in WWII, from his original play; he later wrote the extraordinary Peeping Tom (1960) for Michael Powell.  The low-budget black-and-white cinematograhy is by Walter J. Harvey, who photographed five films in 1951 for Hammer Films previous to their entry into baroque horror films.  Robert Preston, who was mostly working in TV in these years before The Music Man, gives an intense performance as a man who feels he has nothing left to live for except to kill the man and woman who murdered his wife.  Unfortunately the film is directed by Francis Searle, a Hammer regular who turned out four or five low-budget pictures a year.  The cheapness of the film is shown by -- among other things--shoehorning in scenes of decoding which have little to do with the plot and bring the movement of the film to a stop. One can only wonder what Cloudburst might have been like if it had been directed by Fritz Lang, who did the similar-themed Rancho Notorious in 1952, a film of  "hate, murder and revenge."