The next movie watched for the "House of Hammer" Podcast is "Cloudburst", a 1951 film, notable for being the first one Hammer made at Bray Studios following their acquisition of it.
In post war Briton, John Graham (Robert Preston) and his team continue to undertake cryptography work for both the Police and for British Intelligence. His seemingly settled life is devastated when his wife Carol (Elizabeth Sellars) is killed in a hit and run accident. Broken, and out for revenge, he uses contacts within the Police department to track down his wife's killers. Bringing them to justice though, isn't exactly what he has in mind.
Adapted from a play by Leo Marks, who would later provide a screenplay for Michael Powell's seminal "Peeping Tom" "Cloudburst" marks, to my eyes anyway, a big step up in the quality of filmmaking we've seen from Hammer studios. It maybe was that I was watching a print that had been worked on, that might help explain how good the film stock looked or the step up in sound quality - but that wouldn't explain the sudden move to exterior shots, multiple locations, camera's attached to cars for visual effects.
Nor would it account for bringing over Robert Preston to feature as the films lead. This was before he would gather acclaim in "The Music Man" or his Oscar nomination for "Victor/Victoria". Preston is really good here, a proper presence as the devastated leading man. Whilst I appreciate the noir, and indeed general darkness of the picture as a whole, I do wish that it held together a little better. In retrospect, I wish that Graham's skills had tied more into how he tracked down the pair, or even how he covers up what happens to them.
It's not that I disliked it because of this, it's more that I wished that the plot had matched the characterisation, because there's a real depth of backstory to the leads.
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