Circle of Danger (Jacques Tourneur, 1951)

Certainly not the film to introduce someone to the many virtues of Jacques Tourneur's films, but for the already converted this is something of a treat. Chris Fujiwara, in his excellent book Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, opines that "[h]owever much goodwill one brings to viewing the film, one's interest in its leisurely development undergoes some strain, especially in it's second half", but that's not quite my experience. Oswald Morris's cinematography admirably maintains the effortless precision that characterises Tourneur's best work, and the performances are very fine all round, with Ray Milland as good as I've seen him. (The film's tour of 1950s representations of various UK accents is a particular pleasure.) The theme of the post-war letdown, the difficulty of returning to civilian life, is very effectively soft-pedalled. The film also rather pleasingly sets up expectations that it thwarts: a character's homophobia sets itself up to be mistaken as the film's own position, only to be undercut in the conclusion. Certainly, the gentle understatement that runs through the whole film could be accused of dropping the tension below that which we expect from a thriller (and I grant Fujiwara's point that the relationship between Milland and Patricia Roc is sometimes the weak link), but for the most part the slack tension helps connect the film to mundane reality. Heroics or dastardliness are constantly on the threshold, but only on the threshold. That this is entirely appropriate becomes clear in the ending - something of a twist but that plays entirely fair - that generates a quasi-Hitchcockian tension that is all the more effective in the way that it comes out of nowhere and then dissipates in a rather melancholy dying fall.