Dear Murderer (1948)

The Worst Film Ever

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Would you really do anything for the one you love? She's beautiful, your wife and you've just found out that she's been having an affair while you've been away. You've come up with an idea of the "perfect murder". It's going to plan... or is it? This is a really clever plot, you the murderer are getting a two for one deal because you've just found out your wife has been two timing her lover. The police will never suspect you or if they do what are the chances of proving that you did it. There is a great sub-plot which I never saw coming; my evil mind was not focused.

What a glorious mess of jealousy, infidelity, murder and aborted intrigue! But with what stylishness all this advanced and intelligent cruelty is worked out! I have never seen Eric Portman in a sympathetic character, more often than not he has been an almost unilaterally determined murderer and nothing else, and this time he is married to the overly beautiful Greta Gynt. Of course he must love her with a passion which makes it impossible for him to live without her, but how little he knows her! You must not trifle with lovely women,for their beauty will always give them the upper hand on you, and you will be helpless. For all his intelligence and perfect scheming, Portman commits the one mistake of actually believing that his wife loves him when she tells him so, and of course she does, but in her own way. In fact, Portman in all his brilliant superiority of intelligent calculation is the only one who commits mistakes, and he does it all the time and doesn't even notice it, deluded as he is by his own self-confidence and trust in his own perfection, which is hopelessly hollow.Dennis Price as usual makes a brilliant appearance, although unwillingly awkward, while Greta Gynt is the main attraction of this extremely intellectually stimulating play. It's impossible to guess the outcome, and when the desperate chess love game is finished and everyone beaten, only Greta Gynt remains and makes her exit with a hearty laugh. Well, for a lovely woman like her with all those lovers and cavaliers, victims and wrecks, she is superior enough to detach herself from her own tragedy with a laugh.Murder is no laughing matter, and Dennis Price for one understands that too well, while all the others... Anyway, Greta Gynt definitely has the last laugh.

The 'perfect crime' novel, play, film became so ubiquitous that audiences tended to judge them on how credible the 'flaw' that proved the murderer's undoing and in this case it would struggle to rate three out of ten. Director Arthur Crabtree began behind the camera where he had credits on the like of Waterloo Road; he never really made it as a director but this effort begins well enough, boldly even for the time, because we are not told where Eric Portman has been prior to his entering his (we assume) flat, discovering several business cards signed Love Always and decides to confront and kill the sender. Only then does Portman reveal to Dennis Price that he has been in America for six months thus leaving Price clear to bed Portman's wife, Greta Gynt. He cons Price into writing a letter to Gynt that we - seasoned viewers of 'perfect crime' movies - spot as a suicide note, then coolly offs Price but before he can leave Gynt (who has a key, comes in with new lover, Maxwell Reed. This gives Portman a chance to frame Price for the crime and the 'flaw' comes when Gynt tells Portman she has loved him all along and begs him to clear Price without, of course, incriminating himself. HE AGREES. Yeah, you heard; a man who has found incriminating evidence of one lover (Price) and has had it confirmed by Price himself, then sees and hears with his own eyes and ears how Gynt behaves with a second lover, BELIEVES he pathetic story. There is absolutely no chemistry between Gynt and any of the three men (though to be fair we never see her with Price), Reed is as wooden as always and Jack Warner walks through the detective role, possibly mistaking it for the one he played in It Always Rains On Sunday that same year. On a Saturday night in 1947 at the local Odean this would have been perfectly acceptable. Sixty years on it leaves something to be desired.

Very slow moving, but still compelling, worth sticking with till the bitter end, if only to see how it all pans out.Lee finds out his wife is having an affair, so he kills the man, and sets it up to look like a suicide. Only problem is, his wife has stopped having an affair with that man, and moved onto a new affair!Greta Gynt, looking a lot like Gene Tierney, is great, as are Hazel Court and Andrew Crawford, whose parts were unfortunately very small. If you're getting bored, take heed that the movie does pick up an awful lot in the last quarter! 7/10