Michael Powell's Crown v. Stevens (1936)

The thirties was a period of "quota quickies" in England; in an attempt to reduce the number of American films in English movie theatres the law said that 20% of exhibited films had to be British, though they were sometimes allowed to use American stars.  Just as B films in the U. S. allowed some directors to learn their craft by keeping within budgets and allotted running times (see my previous blog entry) "quota quickies" had a similar effect, though they failed to markedly improve British films overall.

Crown v. Stevens is a quota quickie directed by Michael Powell, who eventually went on to direct The Red Shoes (1948) and other brilliant and quirky films; if it had been made in America after WWII it probably would have been labeled a film noir.  It is photographed by Basil Emmott (one of ten British films he photographed in 1936) and he and Powell use claustrophobic sets and shadowy black-and-white cinematography to portray a film of fatalism and class conflict.  Patrick Knowles plays Chris Jensen, a low-paid clerk in a design firm, whose intended bride takes the diamond ring he has for her and absconds with it.  He only had the ring on approval and when he goes to see the moneylender who sold him the ring to plead for time to pay he discovers the moneylender dead and  a woman (played by Beatrix  Thomson, in one of her only four film roles) hiding behind a curtain with a gun, claiming that the moneylender had attacked her.  Jensen does not know what to do and while he ponders what to do next he is asked to pick something up at his boss's house and there discovers that the woman he had seen was Doris Stevens, his boss's wife, "a million people in London and it had to be you," she says.  Jensen now thinks if he reports his boss's wife he will lose his job, which he desperately needs.  Meanwhile Doris's friend, played by the estimable Googie Withers, inadvertently gives Doris an idea, to kill her husband and use the money from his will to buy clothes and to party, her husband being something of a skinflint.  Doris poisons her husband and then leaves him in their motorcar with the engine running, but he is rescued by Jensen and his new girlfriend Molly (Glennis Lorimer).

All this and more in a brisk 66 minutes.  At one point Mrs. Stevens takes the gun she had used to shoot the moneylender and drops it off a bridge, where (unfortunately for her) it lands in a boat and is delivered to the police.  This seemed familiar to me and I remembered the same thing had happened to a gun that Lee. J. Cobb dropped off a bridge in Felix Feist's The Man Who Cheated Himself (blog post of 7/1/18); there undoubtedly is a moral here somewhere.  Powell is particularly good at getting subtle performances from his actors, who are mostly from the stage, and at using his low budget and limited sets to show how easy it can be for one to become trapped in circumstances, including an elaborate ceiling looming ominously over Mr. Stevens.