MURDER OF THE HOME FRONT
UK, 2013, 91 MINUTES, Colour.
Patrick Kennedy, Tamzin Merchant, Emerald Fennell, James Fleet, David Sturzaker, Ryan Gage, John Bowe, Richard Bremmer, John Heffernan.
Directed by Geoffrey Sax.
A murder investigation. In fact, four murders. This is the kind of enjoyable murder mystery, paralleling so many of the popular investigation series on television, a night home watching television, as someone remarked, enjoyable but not taxing.
It is surprising to learn that this story is based on fact, on actual characters. The screenplay is based on a book by Molly Lefubre, a memoir of her working as an assistant to pathologist Keith Simpson during World War II. The character of Molly Cooper in the film dramatises the real Molly. And Peter Kennedy, as Dr Lennox Collins, is based on Simpson. They were considered in their time as pioneers in forensic examination, clues, analysing blood, earwax, cuts by left-handed people, by right-handed people…
The murder mystery is a good one, young prostitutes during the blitz, strangled and their tongues deformed, one with a swastika carved in it. There are police investigating but the attention is not on them, some collaboration with the main Inspector and his irritating associate who picks up all kinds of evidence at murder sites without gloves and doesn’t consider that is done anything wrong! There are also chief inspectors, critical of Dr Collins and his methods.
What makes the film very enjoyable is the great attention to detail in recreating the blitz, the London streets, posters, the Aldwych underground shelter, the seedy locations where bodies are found, bombed buildings, the river and the murder of a homosexual actor in his dressing room. (And something for a plea for tolerance because of the criminalising of homosexuality at that period and the consequences and secrecy.) A lot of attention is given to the laboratory and its detail, a genial assistant working there, Charlie (Richard Bremmer), close-ups of some of the autopsy details which might make the audience momentarily shudder, incisions and cuts…
Peter Kennedy as effective as Dr Lennox although an introductory sequence of him in a bar going home with a woman seems completely unlikely given his later reticence and awkwardness with women, finally letting Molly Cooper, his assistant, teaching him to dance. He is efficient, not pushy, eventually very concerned that innocent man might be hanged.
There was also attention to a nightclub, an orchestra and a performer (resembling Cab Callaway at the Cotton Club). There is a sleazy manager of the club where some of the victims plied their trade. He is a suspect. A rather reticent man who, unfortunately, collect postcards of glamorous women, born in England but with a German name, is also a suspect, targeted by the Home Office, intended as a scapegoat. This is also a customer at the club, a Polish refugee who works in a gunpowder factory but also has a talent for codes, relied on by the government to break the codes to help stop the invasion of Britain.
A whole lot of detection going on, Molly, a sprightly Tamzin Merchant, former journalist who wants a story but to write crime stories being taken on by Dr Collins, working hard, bonding with her lab photographer friend (Emerald Fennell, later Oscar-winner for Promising Young Woman), risking danger with the club manager, then finally confronted by the killer in the air raid shelter.
The screenplay also is condemnatory of government and their involvement in protection of the Polish suspect and their willingness to let the innocent man be hanged – and, because of the compromise in Dr Collins’s threats, he is transferred to internment during the war to the Isle of Man.
Geoffrey Sax had directed films like White Noise but, after this film, spent all his time directing television series in the UK.
