MORNING CALL


UK, 1957, 75 minutes, Black and white.
Greta Gynt, Ron Randell, Garard Green, Bruce Seton, Peter Fontaine, Virginia Keiley.
Directed by Arthur Crabtree.

This is a small British drama of the mid-50s about a kidnapping and, when that is solved, about the continued pursuit of the kidnapper and detection work.

Greta Gynt is a wealthy woman whose doctor husband receives a call in the middle of the night, goes to see a patient, is abducted. She receives a number of notes from the kidnapper with the demand for money and for her not to go to the police. Her lawyer knows an American investigator, played by Ron Randell, and persuades him to come to work with Scotland Yard in the investigation.

While the film focuses on the anguish of the wife as well as her determination, it also shows the work of Scotland Yard and of the American investigator, discovering clues, going through crank letters and calls, appealing for witnesses. One witness, a local prostitute, comes forward but, wanting to get her photo in the paper, declares she could identify the kidnapper instantly. Which leads, of course, to his picking her up, and her not recognising him, her death.

The kidnapper uses all kinds of contacts to reach the wife, setting up a variety of rendezvous meetings, ultimately a cemetery. The wife is asked to travel by train and throw the money out of the train window at a specified signal. The train is stopped. The police and the investigator scours the countryside, the kidnapper disguising himself as a mute fisherman and so eluding them. However, the body of the kidnapped doctor is found.

The film does not end there but continues on with the investigation, with the clues, checking the notes passed from the ransom oney, identifying the location where the kidnapper lives, his penchant for pipe tobacco, where he buys his tobacco, some information as to where he works in demolition. He is caught, pursued, but falls to his death in the demolition work. And the motivation is revealed that the murdered had killed his sister in a car accident six years earlier.

Of its time and of police methods of those days, it is nevertheless interesting to see the workings of a kidnapping case.