Having seen Green for Danger we had a hankering for more Alastair Sim "Green" films, and this one was the obvious candidate. It's nearly ten years on, and Sim is noticeably older, but probably at the height of his comedic powers.
And this is definitely a comedy, but a dark comedy, of the Kind Hearts/Ladykillers type, with Sim playing a hitman for hire who specializes in very targeted bombs. (He's also a character for our times because his targets are always big shots and he takes special delight in bringing down the self-important.) The film begins with a montage of his successes, starting with when he manages to off his headmaster as a child. (He is often in disguise and it's jarring to see him with hair.) In a voiceover he announces that he took a break during WWII, as there was enough killing to go around, and took up employment as a clockmaker. But he's coming out of retirement and his next target will be Sir Gregory Upshott, a bloviating diplomat, about to head off to the Middle East. Sim's Harry Hawkins has already ingratiated himself with Upshott's secretary, Marigold,
who has revealed to him Upshott's plans to have a little dirty weekend with a girl from the typing pool. Hawkins visits her and gets the precise details as he delivers an engagement ring. She is called away and he writes down the name of the hotel and times of the stay on a piece of paper in a stack on her desk before setting off whistling. However, this is the butterfly's wing flap that will cause the hurricane of his undoing, because in the stack of papers is a solitary carbon sheet, and as he heads off home (to his very nice house in Turnham Green - which here looks like a leafy suburb) oblivious, Marigold is discovering the notes he made and looking very troubled. Hawkins wants only to work on his bomb in his workshop (with his beret-wearing Scottish henchman McKechnie)
but is startled to find a policeman waiting in his house, before he remembers that it's Friday, and as a pillar of the local community he plays chess with Sergeant Bassett on Fridays. Well, no problem, he'll lose quickly to the Sergeant... but then Marigold rings up and insists on coming round to really discuss his reason for taking notes (which reminded her of all the times he spent pumping her for information and aroused her (entirely justified) suspicions (this is just the first instance of people very quickly seeing through Sim's character's machinations). Hawkins quickly delegates McKechnie to dealing with her by switching nameplates of his house and next door's, which he happens to know is empty, as it's just been sold. (Hawkins lives in Windy-something, which is the address Marigold is looking for, and the neighbors' is Appleby's.) We see Marigold coming down the street... And then we see a young man coming up to the door, checking the sign and barging in. McKechnie is very taken aback, but it turns out that this young man (George Cole, Sims' frequent co-actor who was more-or-less literally adopted by him, here looking and acting a lot like Michael Crawford in Hello Dolly) is vacuum cleaner salesman William Blake, who has an appointment with Hawkin's housekeeper, who clearly forgot about it when he dismissed her early. McKechnie desperately tries to get rid of him, but William cheerfully talks through him and just keeps unpacking and setting up his fancy vacuum cleaner until McKechnie just beats a retreat when his back is turned and switches back the signs. Meanwhile, William empties a pile of soot on the carpet and then starts telling the story of a salesman who did that not knowing that there was no power before, of course, discovering that there's no power. But then he also discovers a strange dark (the film's in black and white, of course), wet patch on the carpet... And then an attractive young woman (Jill Adams),
carrying a pile of parcels, walks into the house. This is one of the engaged couple who has just bought the house, and she is started to discover William. He assumes she is the woman who arranged the appointment with him, but of course she isn't - her name is Ann Vincent - and in the course of their discussion it emerges that his appointment was at "Windy-something" and she assures him he's in the wrong house. He thinks she is (remembering specifically checking the sign before coming in) but is mystified when he goes outside to check and find's "Appleby's". However, he does convince her there's a body in the house, and tells a story about how the signs were purposely changed that's surprisingly close to the truth. They decide to search the house and are upstairs in the bedroom when they hear somebody come in the house. It is thus that her fiancé (a very stuffy-looking man)
Reginald Willoughby-Cruft discovers them hiding under the bed, and leaps to conclusions that Ann finds very insulting. Eventually he has to leave (after having insisted that Ann not try to hang any paintings because only he will get that right - yes, he's a snob and a prig) to go off to his job as an announcer at the BBC, leaving Ann very angry at William for having misled her. She goes after him insisting that William clean up the ash and be out of the house when she returns. William sweeps up the ash but then is inspired by one of the abstract paintings that appears to have musical notes on it to try to play it, at which point he discovers... Marigold's body in the piano! He races out of the house in a panic (McKechnie has been watching the house and reporting to Hawkins as one person after the other leaves, as naturally he is keen to get back in there to dispose of Marigold) but then comes over to use the phone. Hawkins has to act all shocked but stresses (in order to make himself appear above suspicion) that Sergeant Abbott has just left. Meanwhile McKechnie does get Marigold (Hawkins making sure to keep William from seeing him cart her into the workshop behind the house) and Hawkins has to pretend to be phoning the police. Then he tells William to go next door and wait for the police but not to touch anything and the two pack up to make tracks to the hotel where Sir Gregory will be staying (the titular Green Man, off on the coast). MEANWHILE, Ann has returned while William was next door and is trying on the lingerie that was in the packages she brought home. William hears her and thinks it's the murderer, and bursts in on her clutching a poker.
Again he assures her that there is a body, and she believes him, and he tries to recreate how he thinks it was done and they collapse in a heap... and Reginald returns to find them again (because he left behind a poem he has to read out on the radio later). They tell him about the corpse, but then of course it's not there, and he storms off, and Ann is furious at William again... but then Marigold staggers in!
She's climbed out of the boot of McKechnie's car without him realizing (he drives off to dig a big hole in the woods). Alas, in trying to revive her William and Ann give her the drugged wine that she refused to drink for McKechnie which was why he had to resort to beaning her, but not before she reveals that she's Sir Gregory's secretary and that he's in danger and he's staying at the Green Man at.. and she starts to say the town name but passes out. But she also revealed what she overheard while in Hawkins's house, which is that he's set the bomb to go off at 10:28 that night. (What she doesn't know is that it's in a radio that contains a recording of Sir Gregory's own speech that Hawkins himself made, on the assumption (later confirmed) that if he heard his own voice on the "radio" he would huddle up close to it.) So William and Ann (who now has been bitten by the detective bug) look up all the likely Green Mans and set off in hot pursuit.
The last act of the film is at the titular Green Man, where Sir Gregory is squiring Joan, his anxious typist
(Sir Gregory is even more stuffy and priggish than Reginald, and sneers at Joan's choice of "sliced toad" for dinner (turns out it's toad-in-the-hole), to the extent that you half hope Hawkins succeeds. We also get Terry-Thomas
as a married philanderer who is sweet on the hotel receptionist, an elderly all-female musical trio (who threaten Hawkins' schemes by playing in the room where the radio is, so he has to lure them out into the bar). It's in this part of the film that Sim's comedic acting is at its height, as you read his thoughts on his face in between seeing him smarm to the old ladies and you feel his frustration and triumph. Will William and Ann succeed? Is it over between Ann and Reginald? Watch it and see! (It's not on YouTube, but we signed up to Kanopy, the excellent free streamer that you log into via your library card, and there it was, in a pristine print.) The screenwriters are Launder and Gilliat, creators of basically most of the films we've seen lately, including The Lady Vanishes, Night Train to Munich, Green for Danger, and whose connection to Alastair Sim and George Cole continues in the St. Trinians series, which we might track down next. It was a play first, though, which makes sense given its use of locations and farcical situations. Sim and Cole are great, of course, and you'll recognize a slew of familiar faces
(like Michael Ripper as a waiter, and Arthur Lowe as a radio salesman)
from 70s BBC, but perhaps the revelation is Jill Adams. Not just a pretty face but an excellent comic actress. She deserved to be a star - I don't know why she wasn't.
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