The Lonely House (1957) User Reviews

The Lonely House

[Prismark10 · 6/10 · 29 January 2021]

This one is not a barrel of laughs as a dead body is discovered in a barrel of tar by some road construction workers.

Inspector Duggan is in charge of the case and forensics identify the body as a middle aged woman. Even if they manage to remove all the tar, her best friends would not be able to identify her.

The only thing the police have to go on are her dental records. The dead woman had some bridge work done and when she is identified, the police find out that she was planning to go to Switzerland for a holiday.

When a body of a man is later found in a barrel of tar. The police find more similarities and the trail leads to a marriage bureau. They liked clients who were lonely, middle aged and wealthy.

The victims would be lured to a half finished house to be murdered, the lonely house.

This is another brisk thriller from the Scotland Yard series. Although I think the undercover detective was put at great risk. The others just seem to stand around when the villain went on the attack.

Look out for writer and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy as a newscaster.

Solid, proficiently made Scotland Yard crime featurette.

[jamesraeburn2003 · 31 July 2018]

Superintendent Duggan (Russell Napier) investigates the grim discoveries of bodies found in barrels of boiling tar at road maintenance sites in the home counties. The trail finally leads the Yard to a phony marriage bureau run by a couple who prey on lonely and wealthy people who innocently turn up looking for the right partner. First they trick them with fake proposals of marriage before conning them out of their life savings and then murdering them. Duggan enlists the help of a plain clothes middle-aged police sergeant to approach the bureau posing as a lonely, well-to-do widow looking for a husband. But, can she convince them that she is who she says she is or will she be rumbled by the ruthless pair?

Solid, professionally made crime featurette produced at Merton Park by Anglo Amalgamated as part of their excellent long running series Scotland Yard. Like many of them, it is pretty gruesome in content in places and, for their era, they probably seemed daring. You will be struck by the value for money that the producers were able to cram into these little films. Here, for instance, we get a sequence set in the Swiss alps as Russell Napier (a series regular) follows the complicated trail in order to get his man. There are also many attractive plot elements to be found in these films; in this case the setting of a seemingly respectable marriage bureau that hides a sinister secret. This theme would be exploited to delightful tongue in cheek effect in an episode of the classic British espionage series The Avengers called The Murder Market.

Proficiently directed by Montgomery Tully (1904-88), who was one of Britain's most prolific makers of 30-minute shorts and hour long second features throughout the 1950's-early 60's. He directed fourteen episodes of Scotland Yard in total. Tully was a neglected talent whom very little has been written about until recently. A former documentarist and journalist, he had a brief period as an 'A' film director in the 1940's and, the very best of them, such as the ingenious double jeopardy thriller Murder In Reverse makes one regret that he would fall into the world of quickie production in the early fifties. His best 'B' pictures, which he often scripted or co-scripted as well, are noted for their well-knit story lines, brisk pacing and moments of deft albeit low key inventiveness. The Third Alibi (1961), for instance, was a brilliantly plotted murder thriller with a twist in its tail that takes the audience completely by surprise. A refreshing change from so many quickie thrillers that all too often drift into predictability and mediocrity while Clash By Night (1964) was a thought provoking critique of the justice system, which was quite subtly spun, it has to be said, from its standard thriller plot about the hijacking of a prison van in which the prisoners and their warders find themselves locked in a paraffin-soaked barn on Bonfire Night. Even Tully's lesser films contain odd piercing moments of inspiration suggesting that he was a film maker who bent over backwards to make something worthwhile out of even the most unpromising of material.