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Adapted from a successful stage play by Richard (How Green Was My Valley)
Llewellyn, Noose forms part of the 'spiv cycle' of a dozen or so British films
produced between 1945-50. Described as a 'black market comedy thriller', it
displays some slack plotting and character motivation, but has moments of
striking visual style.
Whereas 'foreign' Italian racketeer Sugiani is associated with business and
violent criminality, Bason's gang represent the British proletariat - tellingly
a poster in the opening scene states 'We Work or Want'. They are WW2 veterans,
now hard-working market porters. To distinguish themselves from racketeers, they
wear football jerseys during the raid, and they use good old-fashioned
fisticuffs. In its depiction of good guys versus criminals, Noose captures a
widely held view in 1948 that black marketeers like Sugiani, who evaded
conscription and profited through criminal activity during the war, needed to be
brought to account. The Soho church and the choir heard in the film act as a
reminder that a moral code has been violated, so it is appropriate that Sugiani
meets his end there.
But the tone of Noose is uncertain - there is little of the sense of threat
that one expects from film noir, and the sometimes dramatic lighting has little
effect beyond an exercise in visual style. Menace is diffused by comedy: in the
portrayal of Bar Norman, Mercia's reading matter, and the western saloon-like
raid at the finale. Noose also evokes the murky world of
Contraband (d. Michael Powell, 1940) set in the WW2 London blackout with a West
End cinema acting as a front for villainy. In Noose, the 'Blue Moon' singer
performs in French, and there is elegant dancing. The acting style is decidedly
theatrical, notably Nigel Patrick's mannered performance as Bar Gorman, with his
telephone answering routine clearly modelled on Sid Field's comic spiv.
Maltese-born Joseph Calleia, who spent most of his career playing Hollywood
villains, plays Sugiani in a highly melodramatic manner, with heavy make-up
emphasising his saturnine features. He and Gorman are the characters you
remember - both far more interesting than the dull Hoyle and Rendall. Sugiani's
gang features excellent character performances from Edward Rigby, Hay Petrie and
Uriel Porter, as black gang member 'Coaly', and Carole Landis attractively plays
a journalist writing about Dior's 'new look', and of course, wearing it.
Tragically, she had died by the time of the film's release in August
1948.
Roger Philip Mellor
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Monthly Film Bulletin review
