A Movie Every Night: Green for Danger

Green For Danger (1946)
Director: Sidney Gilliat
Starring: Sally Gray, Trevor Howard (wheet whoo), Rosamund John, Alastair Sim, Leo Genn

Sally Gray, Leo Genn, Trevor Howard, Megs Jenkins and Rosamund John
One of you is a murderer

My GOD I love the Criterion Collection.

This is a somewhat above average murder mystery in that the mystery is a little weak, but everything else is fantastic. The inspector on the case (played by a sly Alastair Sim) gets all the good lines and he shoots them out with a wonderful casual flippancy. He's like a shaved, well-mannered Dr. House. Trevor Howard and Leo Genn are the central men, both capable of love or murder, and the nurses, Sally Gray, Rosamund John, Judy Campbell and Megs Jenkins (who always seems to play a nurse or a housekeeper), have distinct characters and personalities, unlike the typical damsel-in-distress types. It's easy to believe that they could all be capable of murder, but who could it be......

Inspector Cockrill examines ghostly fingerprints left by the victim

Why do I love Criterion? Because this film is beautifully restored so that every nuance is highlighted, from the back lighting through the cabinet to illuminate a victim's fingerprints on glass, to the sharpening up of the background so that we can see the eerie hanging skeleton decorations at the hospital party. (Nurse "Freddie" remarks that it's August, so it's not Halloween. Are the skeletons some nurse's nutty idea of decorations or is it a presentiment of things to come?)

Dr. Barnes drinks away his troubles while the ornamental dead look on

Even the drinks shine with luminosity that made me thirsty for a cocktail (until they started talking about poison). By cleaning up the negative they've restored all of the purposeful shadows and lights, and the sound is so clean you can hear every innuendo that passes between them all. Sure, as mysteries go, the story could have used a little more work at the resolution, but watching it lead up to that point was more than worth it.

Tomorrow, what you've all been waiting for: La Decima Vittima (1965)