User Reviews

Lance Comfort directed some pretty distinctive films in the 1940s ("Hatter's Castle"(1941) etc) but after the commercial failure of "Portrait of Clare" (1950) he was soon relegated to Bs. He found himself in demand, even doing a TV series "Douglas Fairbanks Presents", because he managed to make even his most insignificant films stand out usually by making his main characters a little naïve or gullible. This was certainly the case with this movie, adapted from the book "To Dusty Death" by Hugh McCutcheon and with a plot line lifted from the vastly superior and believable "Home By Seven" (1952). In this one Richard Logan (William Franklyn) stumbles into his flat after being found groggy and dazed in a local wasteground by a young boy. He thinks he is late by a few hours but distraught wifey Julie (Moira Redmond) informs him that he has been missing for three weeks!! She is understandably frantic and has already linked him to his comely secretary. It may be Franklyn's demeanour but wow, he sure looks shifty, especially when he is busy denying knowledge of good time girl Mavis (pretty Jacqueline Jones looks very fetching) who is forever ringing Julie and demanding to speak to Richard. Another worry is a private investigator hired by Julie and whose card turns up in Richard's pocket - he has been found dead and Richard can't be certain whether he killed him in those three lost weeks!!

Then there is "the song" - "My Heart is the Lover", one of those dreary songs that often turned up in these type of movies and sung by nondescript singer Ronny Hall. Only problem is - it is used as a plot device so harassed Richard begins hearing it everywhere he goes - Julie even plays it when they're having breakfast!! And did I mention he also has the strange feeling he is being followed. Every time he comes home he looks as though he has been roughed up and I'm sorry, Julie isn't buying the old "I fell over" routine. He soon realises he had been kidnapped by a gang who want him to break into one of his own safes to steal a priceless diamond and he was coshed when he tried to escape - fortunately for the crooks he lost all recollection of his entrapment. By the time his memory returns (through hailing a cab) he has already pieced together the facts that it is an inside job!!

Beautiful Nanette Newman is almost the one bright spot - her Mary is coolly 1960's chic, she is his efficient secretary but surely she couldn't be involved!! She is engaged to resident teddy boy, the charmless Ted (Anthony Booth, soon to be cast in classic British comedy "Till Death Us Do Part" and also the father of former P.M. Tony Blair's wife Cherie) - he has a chip on his shoulder and for some odd reason seems to despise Logan. This is a solid little thriller distributed by the lowly Butcher Company which was the oldest film company in Britain, starting out in 1909 with training documentaries.

Man awakes up bruised and unsteady in a ditch. Seeing the time he hurries home where he apologizes to his wife for being three hours late. What he doesn't realize is that he's actually three weeks late and his wife has been worried sick. Over the next couple of days he attempts to piece together what happened to him and in the process finds he's being followed by strange men. Good solid B film works thanks to its plot being far from typical and a game cast that manages to sell the slightly contrived bits of the tale. It's the sort of film that's perfect for a rainy Sunday or a Saturday curled up on the couch watching mysteries until the wee hours.

A safe designer called Richard Logan (William Franklyn) awakes on a bomb site in Wapping High Street after being coshed by a gang of thugs. However, he finds that as a result of his head injury he has lost his memory and has no recollection of what has happened to him over the past three weeks. In addition, the PI hired by his wife, Julie (Moira Redmond), to find him has been found murdered and Logan has his business card in his pocket. Could he have been the killer? It transpires that a safe, which his firm designed for the owners, has been broken open and the contents stolen. It seems that he was abducted by a criminal gang and forced to break open the safe and with the aid of his wife sets out to unravel the mystery. But the gang lead by Clifton Conrad (Leonard Sachs), who owns a seedy club in Soho is intent on murdering him before he regains his memory and exposes them...

An efficient b-pic thriller from quota quickie specialists, Butcher's Film Distributors, which is briskly directed by Lance Comfort and provides enough intrigue to keep the punters entertained for the first half of the double bill. The main drawback is Comfort's own script (adapted from the novel To Dusty Death by Hugh McCutcheon), which at times borders on the absurd. But the director makes best possible use of what obviously was a shoe string budget and the proceedings have a nice feeling for the place (London and the Home Counties) and period which are much enhanced by the atmospheric lighting of veteran cameraman Basil Emmott. The film's other weak aspect is the irritating slushy pop ballad, My Heart Is The Lover, sung by one Ronnie Hall which keeps reoccurring throughout the movie as it is used as a plot device - the hero keeps on hearing it in his head but he can't think where he could have heard it as it was only recently released while he was missing. Needless to say it provides him with a vital clue later as to the gang's whereabouts. The vocalist Hall appears in a nightclub scene and trivia buffs should note that the backing band is no other than The Dave Clark Five who were shortly to become international pop stars. Pit Of Darkness also has a better cast than one would expect of a British B including William Franklyn, Moira Redmond, Nigel Green and a young Anthony Booth best known as Alf Garnett's son-in-law Till Death Us Do Part.

The title sounds like a Hammer cast-off, but the film is in actual fact a low-budget thriller about a safe-designer who wakes up dazed in Wapping, found by a young urchin, having been roughed up by some hoods. He goes home to his worried wife and finds he's lost three weeks of memory. The evidence suggests he's been having an affair with a woman named Mavis (only in England!), and killed the private investigator his wife sent to find him, although he claims not to know either. Soon he is being followed by some mysterious men in a grey Mercedes, and lured to a country house with a bomb in it. His efforts to retrieve his memory, and the possibly criminal events he has taken part in, are complicated by the possibility that he's going mad.

The story of a man who wakes up in a strange place unable to account for a period of time is familiar enough - from Hitchcock's 'Spellbound' to the recent 'Memento'; it has even been treated comically in Launder and Gilliat's 'A Constant Husband'. It was also a feature of some of the more daring British TV programmes of the 60s, including 'The Avengers' and 'The Prisoner'. In some ways, 'Pit of Darkness' feels like an early TV programme, with its short length, its low-budget, one-take genre aesthetic, and the groovy John Barry/Laurie Anderson music that punctuates occasionally.

Lance Comfort was a prolific producer of these kinds of film throughout his career, and is today, despite a recent monograph, a neglected, even despised figure. His work is accused of a lack of imagination, poor execution, shoddy construction. His films are shown quite frequently late at night on British TV, but invariably any TV guide will give them the lowest rating, dismiss them as beneath contempt or 'sleazy', an example of an underside of British film production that would give birth to soft porn in the 1970s and video nasties in the 80s.

I am not for one minute suggesting that 'Pit' is any masterpiece, but I will claim that it is clearly superior to films like 'The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner' and 'A Kind of Loving', or anything from the Free Cinema/New Wave/social-realism being touted in the Britain of the period. Its script (also by Comfort) is intelligent and often inspired. the amnesia plot gives an added dimension to any mystery, for two reasons: the hero must become a detective and may be the criminal; the clues and spaces he investigates are also a topography of his own mind, an indication of its fragility, raising the possibility that it might never be known. Logan's interruption of three weeks is profoundly disruptive, not only to his own identity, but also his marriage, and the retrieval of one is intimately linked to the other - he can only begin solving his personal mystery after he's convinced his wife.

But does he solve his own mystery? The filming rarely matches the quality of the screenplay, but there are some excellent sequences, the best being Logan's return home from nearly being bombed (an eerie crime-in-the-country set-piece that would be exploited in 'The Avengers' and Hammer horror); the dreamlike tone carries over, the profound alienation of a man exploring his own home; he hears his wife talking, and the scene becomes fragmented, broken voices and sounds assailing him, a possible flashback, an insane vision, the realisation that his wife is involved, we don't know, but the dream/mystery filming (repetition of events, uncanny silences and emptiness) is closer to Resnais that British quota quickies.

Throughout the inchoate repetition of a pop record he's never heard haunts him, and signals mental breakdown of some sort. When he begins to piece everything together, the process is preceded by one of these cues: it is significant that his solution is plausible only in terms of his own flawed conclusions, and could be coloured by his own fears and prejudices (his resentment at Ted for taking away a secretary it's implied he's been seeing etc.). The effect is bravely ambivalent.

Further, the date on which Logan wakes is September 13. He's been missing three weeks, and twice he's told something he's aware of (the record, his wife's play) only came into existence ten days ago. That's September 3, the date World War Two started. He's found in a Blitzed bomb site, and his friend and partner compares his amnesia to one he received as an airman during the war. Is Comfort's modest psychological thriller really a film about Britain and its memory of the war? The fact that he's given us a film so rich in ambiguity suggests critics shouldn't be so quick to dismiss him.

A man called Richard Logan wakes up in Wapping with a whopping headache and when he returns home to his wife Julie finds out he has been missing for three weeks. Although suffering from memory loss he tries to discover what happened and whether he is a thief or, even worse, a murderer. It's a good mystery with pleasant location shooting and directed efficiently on a low budget by the under rated Lance Comfort. William Franklyn is suitably distressed as the amnesic Richard and is given good support by welcome character actors like Leonard Sachs, Nigel Green, Jacqueline Jones and Michael Balfour. The plot doesn't quite hold together but it isn't dull. The Ronnie Hall song 'My Heart is the Lover' however does become grating after a short while.

This is a British crime film that seems to have used chunks of other films,tried to reassemble them only to find that they don't fit together.Franklyn returns home after 3 unexplained weeks.Weren't the police out looking for him?He was kidnapped so that he could reveal details of a safe designed by his firm.A device common in many fifties films.it is unclear as to whether he has amnesia or is just constantly beaten up.Later on in the film there is a flashback when Franklyn finally realises what has happened.However at the same time he is being kidnapped by the same gang for the same reason.Extremely confusing.The ending is rather predictable and not particularly exciting.

William Franklyn had a new TV series coming out & this film was probably meant to make the actor more visible. The problem is that the film was apparently rewritten while it was being made. The director could not decide which robbery would occur first, the jewels or the "Ethiope's ear". When talking about the first robbery with the secretary the characters talked of the diamond robbery @ Sir Herbert's. But near the end they are robbing the diamonds again. In Franklyn's flashback he is removing the "Ethiope's ear". They also may have eliminated a complication, because Nigel Green is aware of the "Ethiope's ear" before he should have known about it. I think this film has the 'ear marks' of a hastily produced star turn for Franklyn. The movie also has Ronnie Hall & the Dave Clark five.