I think my main problem with this was the casting of Richard Burton as the titular gangster, clearly based on a composite of the Kray twins.
Burton doesn't really seem suited to playing a criminal psychopath, and the bad cockney accent is just the start of it.
Maybe this was around the time he was rumoured to be drunk during entire shoots (probably an exaggeration, but he does seem a little detached in certain scenes).
The script by Dick Clement…
My second favourite film in the first volume of Radiance's ongoing World Noir Blu-Ray collection, behind the wonderful Witness in the City.
I've not seen too many Italian films, something I mean to correct. This one had a wonderful backdrop of 1950s Rome, captured in crisp black and white, with most of the action centering around a grand apartment complex neighbouring a town square (complete with an indefatigable fountain).
It's all quite routine murder mystery, with noir tinges, elevated to higher places by the energetic performance of director Pietro Germi.
Charmingly quaint English film about a man who comes home to his adoring wife after vanishing for 24 hours, then soon discovers there's been a murder, and he's well and truly implicated.
He literally doesn't know what day it is. I genuinely wondered if this film could've been the inspiration for one of David Bowie's final lyrics: "Where the fuck did Monday go?". Great fun imagining Ralph Richardson saying that in his impeccable 1950s English accent.
His wife trusts him…
Staggeringly good film noir.
This has all the essentials, and a big heart. For anyone who maybe feels the femme fatale trope is a little tired, she enters and exits stage right in the opening scene (no spoiler). What's left is the desperate ion dominated man refusing to let go of his bad luck, and getting everyone else tangled up in it, trope.
Cannot believe this isn't more widely known, and I hope Radiance's superb Blu-Ray release goes some way to remedying that.
