When they were paired in The Maltese Falcon as that sinister, fey duo The Fat Man (Mr. Gutman) and Joel Cairo, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre struck an immediate chord with audiences. So much so that, over the next five years they went on to team up in nine more movies (in one of them, Hollywood Canteen, as themselves). The Verdict is the last of them.
A London-by-gaslight thriller set in 1890, The Verdict tries to combine the atmosphere of the Sherlock Holmes stories (fog, hansom cabs, capes and toppers, bachelors' quarters) with the plot devices of Agatha Christie (pivotal points are lifted from both The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express). Unfortunately, this cozy throwback to locked-room murder mysteries of an earlier time strikes a wrong note in the first full year of the post-war era, when the dark flowers of film noir in which both Greenstreet and Lorre played far from incidental roles were everywhere blossoming underfoot.
Scotland Yard Inspector Greenstreet gets nudged into early retirement when a man he sent to the gallows is found to have been innocent. He nurses a grudge against his arrogant replacement (George Coulouris) and bides his time.
When a prominent young cad is found stabbed in his locked chambers and the police get nowhere, Greenstreet steps in. Both he and Lorre moved in the same circles as the dead man, as did a Member of Parliament, around whom suspicion slowly deepens.
Though there are ties to an insolent music-hall singer (Joan Lorring) and the unseen wife of a peer of the realm, the story unfurls in the fussy Victorian world of unattached males. A vicious twist at the end leaves one perplexed: Is there enough psychological back story to justify it, or is it a desperate, last-ditch contrivance? In any case, it's much more Greenstreet's movie than Lorre's, but both contributed better work elsewhere during their five-year cinematic liaison.
A London-by-gaslight thriller set in 1890, The Verdict tries to combine the atmosphere of the Sherlock Holmes stories (fog, hansom cabs, capes and toppers, bachelors' quarters) with the plot devices of Agatha Christie (pivotal points are lifted from both The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express). Unfortunately, this cozy throwback to locked-room murder mysteries of an earlier time strikes a wrong note in the first full year of the post-war era, when the dark flowers of film noir in which both Greenstreet and Lorre played far from incidental roles were everywhere blossoming underfoot.
Scotland Yard Inspector Greenstreet gets nudged into early retirement when a man he sent to the gallows is found to have been innocent. He nurses a grudge against his arrogant replacement (George Coulouris) and bides his time.
When a prominent young cad is found stabbed in his locked chambers and the police get nowhere, Greenstreet steps in. Both he and Lorre moved in the same circles as the dead man, as did a Member of Parliament, around whom suspicion slowly deepens.
Though there are ties to an insolent music-hall singer (Joan Lorring) and the unseen wife of a peer of the realm, the story unfurls in the fussy Victorian world of unattached males. A vicious twist at the end leaves one perplexed: Is there enough psychological back story to justify it, or is it a desperate, last-ditch contrivance? In any case, it's much more Greenstreet's movie than Lorre's, but both contributed better work elsewhere during their five-year cinematic liaison.