The Rossiter Case (1951)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

THE ROSSITER CASE is a very low budget and slow paced mystery yarn from Hammer Films, made on a particularly tiny budget. The main characters are a disabled woman and her husband, who is carrying on a secret affair with her own sister. You get an hour of slow-witted melodrama and inaction followed by some brief murder elements, but it's all very trite and hackneyed and not a patch on the other thrillers that Hammer would put out both during the 1950s and 1960s. It says something that the only fun here is from witnessing a pre-stardom Stanley Baker in a cameo during the opening pub scene.

The only point of interest in this way too talky film was seeing a young Stanley Baker as a glorified extra cast as Joe who is entrusted with one line of dialogue by the producers and yet he became the more famous of the cast.Other reviewers have given the basic premise of this 1950 film which could have been edited to one half its length.I will not repeat the sparse plot and I only rated it 6/10.The only actor familiar to me was seeing Euen Solon as the police inspector.I agree with another user's review, it should not have been filmed but consigned to the radio at a time when most of the population went to the cinema to see their heroes and heroines of the silver screen and listened to the radio.

The plot of the film largely has to do with the love triangle between a married man, his wife, who was paralyzed in a car crash and her sister who is having an affair with the husband. The sister wants the husband to leave his wife, but he won't and it causes all sorts of problems...Actually it leads to murder in the final 15 or 20 minutes of the film. There is no mystery as to who does it, the real question is will they be found out and what will the ramifications be.A way too talky film substitutes talk for action. Nothing much really happens other than emotions simmer under the surface which would be all fine and good except that the film is largely static as a result with people just sitting and standing around talking with no sense of motion (this would have been a heck of a radio play. By the time the murder happens you really won't care, especially after the denouncement at the end What were they thinking?

Not bad for this little flick from UK and directed by the prolific Francis Searle, as were Godfrey Grayson, Monty Tully, Vernon Sewell and many other filmmakers who worked for small companies: Butchers, Danzigers etc...Pleasant, entertaining tale of a paralysed young woman after a car accident who have to face her husband and his new mistress. Predictable, as you may guess, especially between the two women. But it remains an acceptable time waster, and really well acted. The seventy five minutes are quick for the viewer in front of his TV set.I can't although tell it's a film noir, as I am used to. But at least a fairly good drama.