Flat Two

Death of the gambling hell maven, a foreign fellow one remembers for applying the screws at Malta.

Case of the long-suffering business partner back from “a few days’ holiday in the Old Country”, and the junior architect whose manikin fiancée has a lengthy losing streak at the roulette table, and the barrister with a very lengthy memory.

“I’ve been thinking,” the detective inspector reports. His boss the assistant commissioner inquires, “what, again?” The crime scene is a block of flats the architect assisted on, he has another of his own in the works and is seen painting a tree for the scale model. “I’ve got a faith in our splendid police,” he says, “they might find out who did it, and I’d be all right!” Hitchcock’s Blackmail is practically called as a witness, cf. Zampi’s The Naked Truth.

An Edgar Wallace Mystery. The obscure relationship to Losey’s Accident is not in the plot but the structure, for “in the great World War Two” it was not the American cousin nor the young man with hopes who brought the bastard down, but the settled observer who saw it all happen once before, very nearly.

Vic Pratt (British Film Institute), “struggles to cram the sometimes cumbersome twists and turns of the whodunit plot into the brief running time,” citing the Monthly Film Bulletin on “verbal explanations” and Kine Weekly “by way of contrast”. TV Guide, “the series tended to overcondense”.

The Right Prospectus
Play for Today

The self-made man goes to public school for “polish”, he and his polished wife, she thrives, he founders in their separate houses, new boys.

After all the larks she’s still keen on her holiday pensum, he’s still a self-made man.