robert-temple-1 Review of Chase a Crooked Shadow

Chase a Crooked Shadow (1958)

Superb and harrowing mystery thriller

[18 August 2011]

Michael Anderson here has directed a really hair-raising and sinister mystery thriller. The story is most ingenious and creepy: a man, played by Richard Todd, appears one evening at Anne Baxter's villa near Barcelona and pretends to know her intimately. He says he is her brother. But as she knows very well, he is an impostor. Her brother was killed only a year before in a car crash, and she identified his body. Who is this man? What does he want? He won't go away and she calls the local police chief (Herbert Lom) to have him thrown out. But he produces impeccable credentials, a passport, a letter of credit for the bank, and so forth, to prove that he is Baxter's brother. Despite Baxter's increasingly hysterical insistence that this man is an impostor, Lom has to go away, though his suspicions have been aroused, and he keeps an eye on things as they develop. Meanwhile, Todd cannot be dislodged, and he moves into the villa. Baxter's maid vanishes on a sudden holiday and is replaced with Todd's woman friend, played by Faith Brook. Todd also introduces a butler called Carlos. Baxter is understandably in a continual state of fear, surrounded now by aliens in her own house, unable to do anything about it, though she keeps trying. Then the intruders show their hand: it is all about £10 million of missing diamonds which had belonged to Baxter's deceased father, a diamond king of South Africa (Baxter's character is named Kimberley, get it?). Where are the diamonds? But that is not all. There is also the matter of the Last Will and Testament which they present to her, which she is meant to sign, before they drown her. Baxter does an excellent job of becoming increasingly shrill and distraught in this impossible situation. But the main impact of the film comes from the perfect manners of Richard Todd, who is genteel and controlled at all times. This provides the necessary eerie quality to the surreal events of the story. Richard really was such a 'perfect gent'. I knew him late in life, and, like John Mills, he was always impeccably dressed and had the most perfect manners and gentility. They 'don't make 'em like that anymore'.