Displaying items by tag: Patricia Dainton

THE HOUSE IN MARSH ROAD

UK, 1960, 70 minutes, Black-and-white.

Tony Wright, Patricia Dainton, Sandra Dorne, Derek Aylward, Sam Kydd, Anita Sharp-Bolster.

Directed by Montgomery Tulley.

A cinematic curiosity item, not essential viewing. However, it was a supporting feature from the changing British industry around 1960, relying on its director, Montgomery Tully, documentarist. then small features.

It has a basic plot that anyone could have written: a marriage, a self-centred alcoholic husband wanting to be an author, his patient wife, his beginnng an affair with a glamorous dicorcee who is his typist. An affair, rendezvous, deception, discovery, confrontation…

The husband, played by Tony Wright, reveals not a single redemptive quality and so alienates audiences, identifying with the much more sympathetic Patricia Dainton.

But, this is also a ghost story!, As explained, a resident poltergeist named Patrick. And there is an Irish housekeeper firmly believing in Patrick and explaining the various interventions.

And, this is what makes this film different, at various times when the couple come to the house in the remote countryside, inherited by the wife from her aunt, Patrick moves furniture, shatters a mirror when the typist visits the house…

But, as expected, when the husband plots the murder of his wife, spikes her drink, carries it upstairs just like Cary Grant in suspicion, then tries to put his push his wife down a liftwell, Patrick intervenes to prevent her from drinking the poison as well as closing the gate on the lift well.

The climax is a storm with thunder and lightning, the wife driving back from London with her friend and legal adviser, the couple still in the house, Patrick setting it alight, the demolition of the house and the couple, and happy ending for the long-suffering wife…