Handsome nice guy American drifter Paul Farrell (a solid and appealing performance by Kerwin Mathews) finds himself stuck in rural France. He seeks room and board in the home of the alluring Eva Bryant (well played with beguiling sexiness by Nadia Gray) and her sweet, but equally fetching teenage daughter Annette (a charming portrayal by the adorable Lilliane Brousse). Paul agrees to help Eva break her dangerously unstable husband Georges (a suitably menacing turn by Donald Houston) out of an asylum. Sound good and exciting? Well, alas this middling Hammer thriller doesn't amount to much because of Michael Carreras' competent, but pedestrian direction and Jimmy Sangster's strangely bland, talky, and uneventful script. The key problem is that Carreras and Sangster let the meandering narrative plod along at too leisurely a pace and crucially fail to generate much in the way of tension or momentum; it's only in the last third of the picture that the story finally starts cooking to some moderate degree with a nifty double twist surprise ending. On the plus side, Wilkie Cooper's crisp widescreen black and white cinematography offers plenty of breathtaking shots of the lovely French countryside scenery and Stanley Black's swinging jazzy score hits the right-on groovy spot. Moreover, the cast do their best with the blah material: Mathews, Gray, and Brousse are all fine in the lead roles, with sturdy support from George Bastell as the no-nonsense Inspector Etienne and Arnold Diamond as affable local constable Janiello. A strictly passable time-killer.
Review of Maniac
