This 1951 drama-thriller from director Jacques Tourneur and veteran genre writer Philip MacDonald, which sees Ray Milland coming to grimy postwar Britain demanding answers about his brother’s death, is a gem: focused, fast-moving and a little eccentric. It is a British-set movie that takes us on a travelogue tour from the coast of Tampa, Florida, to London – and from there to Wales, the Scottish Highlands and Birmingham. There is a lovely scene shot on location in London’s Covent Garden, in the days of the fruit and veg market, with crowds of real people looking on.
There are no explicit action sequences: no shootouts, not even a punch-up. But it’s entirely absorbing with an undertow of mystery and tension, a mix of humour and seriousness that Alfred Hitchcock would have recognised and a streak of wayward romance that put me in mind of Powell and Pressburger. These comparisons are partly down to the casting – many actors here gave more well-known (though not necessarily better) performances for these other iconic directors – but also down to Circle of Danger being produced by the brilliant and formidable screenwriter Joan Harrison, a longtime associate of Hitchcock’s whose biography was published by Christina Lane in 2020 but who deserves much more attention from movie historians.
Milland plays Clay Douglas, a tough American with a sentimental sense of his own Scottish heritage, who comes to Britain to find out what really happened to his kid brother during the second world war. Impressed by the British standing alone against the Nazis, the younger American had gallantly volunteered for the British military in 1940, and was killed in action as part of a commando raid in northern France. He was not universally liked in the ranks and was the only man in his unit to die, in circumstances that seem oddly unexplained.
Clay wants answers, and his quest for the truth takes him to his brother’s former commanding officer Hamish McArran (Hugh Sinclair), and in bohemian London to another officer, Sholto Lewis (Marius Goring), now a smarmy and obnoxious ballet choreographer (depicted, sadly, with a touch of that era’s casual homophobia). Clay falls in love with a beautiful young English writer in Scotland called Elspeth Graham (played by the Gainsborough star Patricia Roc) and has a running-joke inability to be on time for their dates. Most hilariously, he has an encounter with Reggie Sinclair, an army intelligence officer who in Civvy Street has become a rackety used-car-dealer, played with gimlet-eyed wit and fun by Naunton Wayne. He is married to a bubbly nightclub singer, a small role from which Dora Bryan lovingly squeezes every drop.
It is an endlessly watchable and entertaining film, with a tense and eerie final confrontation scene: an impromptu “shooting party” which is the only sequence where firearms make an appearance, all accompanied by the thin howling of the wind. And it’s wrapped up in a tight 86 minutes: a really sharp and elegant piece of storytelling.
• Circle of Danger is released on 5 February on digital platforms, DVD and Blu-ray.
