9/10
Richard Carlson falling into a bottomless pit of a case
28 April 2023
Richard Carlson was always an enjoyable figure on the screen, always efficient, intelligent, with a lot of ironic humour and splendid directness, with a very expressive face, and to his acting comes here a splendid script with wonderful complications and turnings to the unexpected, which even Richard Carlson has some difficulty in following in the beginning, but eventually he catches up. Partnering him are two ladies of very different kind, Roman Anderson as a cheeky assistant almost importuning into his intimacy, and Greta Gynt, the double beauty of very doubtful intentions and unfathomable secrets. The mystery here is all about a third woman who is dead by suicide, according to the coroner's report, but there is something very fishy about her death, so when "Whispering Smith" comes to town he is immediately hooked to investigate the case. Although the police is quite satisfied with the coroner's report, there was no motive for her suicide, while at the same time no one seems to have had any motive for doing her in. In brief, nothing fits, and "Whispering Smith" finds himself enmeshed in a hopeless case of no way out and only black holes. Gradually it appears that the deceased woman was not altogether agreeable, there were two sides to her character, and everyone involved with her, Herbert Lom for one, Reginald Beckwith for another, her lawyer, all deeply in love with her, had some blackmail racketeering in common. Eventually Richard Carlson clears the case, in which nothing was anything else than fake, and we shall never know what the murdered woman really looked like.
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