Green For Danger (1946 Alastair Sim)

Adapted from a novel by Christianna Brand, one of six humorous whodunits

featuring Inspector Cockrill of the Kent County Police, Green For Danger (d.

Sidney Gilliat, 1947) considerably alters Brand's story and its protagonist.

Originally set in a military hospital during the Blitz in 1941, the film

relocates the action to a civilian emergency hospital during the doodlebug

campaign of 1944. The major changes in Gilliat and Claude Guerney's

screenplay, however, were reserved for the main character. Although Launder

and Gilliat made a number of thrillers over the years, Gilliat disliked

whodunits, and hoped to largely remove that element from the plot, but Brand's

original story was too carefully constructed to survive without it. Their

solution, as Gilliat later recalled, was to "make capital of the very clichés

of the detective novel".

To this end they structured the screenplay so that the first third set up the

mystery in a traditional fashion, though undercutting it somewhat with a wry

voice-over. When Inspector Cockrill arrives, most of the viewer's assumptions,

about the characters and the mystery genre, start to unravel.

They turned Cockrill into the narrator and cast the comic actor Alastair Sim

in the role. The film subtly guys the whole genre, with the Inspector

frequently proved wrong and even partly responsible for the last death. In one

priceless scene, he smugly turns to the last page of a mystery novel to find

that he has incorrectly guessed the identity of the murderer.

Green For Danger is a remarkable mixture of sly comedy and genuine thrills,

with the sardonic and sarcastic humour of the protagonist providing a good

counterpoint to the darkly atmospheric surroundings of the hospital - shot

with considerable panache by Launder and Gilliat's regular cameraman Wilkie

Cooper. This is seen at its best in the night-time sequence in which the

various characters roam around the hospital grounds before one of them meets

her end at the hands of a spectral murderer dressed in a surgical gown. Except

for two establishing shots at the beginning of the story, the film was shot

entirely inside Pinewood studios, including all the 'exteriors'. The result is

probably Gilliat's most visually accomplished and controlled film as director.


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