Rule Britania -Boultings begin

Rule Britania! 

For someone who the virus has made desperate and has to see anything, how about the Boultings’ first feature? I found it on You Tube under The Films of Alistair Sim - who has no connection with it. Shot in twelve days to the demands of a British quota quickie, Trunk Crime / Design for Murder is by any objective standard a dreadful movie. Though made in 1939, it anticipates the nastiness of the Leslie Arliss films of the forties and the shoddiness of the British support fillers of the fifties but it still has all sorts of claims on our curiosity.

The Boultings

Graduate Manning Whiley is about to go down from his un-named university. A suspect case this one. He wouldn’t go out for games at school, has voice over nightmares about being buried alive and keeps bella donna in his rooms.  A group of revolting undergraduates burst in and wreck his space. Boy is he mad!

So much so that when their leader comes down to apologize and make good any damage (“That’s decent of you!”) Whiley poisons him and stuffs him in the trunk he’s taking back to his rural home.

At least his village is less hostile than his college. The local bobby minds the rail station while the porter delivers Whiley’s locked trunk. However Whiley’s tenant Barbara Everest loves his home (“The whole marsh is so intriguing!”) and she’s still hanging about with her also revoltingly debby daughter and the girl’s fiancé Thorley Walters (a familiar face at last). Worse, they crash their car into the (off screen) dyke and have to carry the daughter back for care while comic yokel Hay Petrie keeps on popping up draining Whiley’s whiskey in the room where he’s keeping the body in the trunk.

Though it reeks of the smell of the greasepaint, (“Even as a child I had to turn inwards. I had dark thoughts”) the film does hold attention till a ridiculous anti climax.  We’re not too far from “Rope” or “Night Must Fall.” The production values though limited are quite effective, mainly playing in under lit interiors with just two brief out of doors shots to set up the railway journey. There are a couple of awkward edits but close-ups like the eye dropper or the recovered key are telling. Shooting on film gives it an edge on the TV dramas it resembles.

Put it up against early works of the Boltings' British peer directors like Michael Powell’s 1932  Rynox or John Guillermin’s 1950 Torment  eg. and this one isn’t disgraced.

Barrie Pattison 2020