Blind Justice

Girl in the News/Tread Softly Stranger (1940/1958) is a nice double bill of English noir or noir adjacent movies, both worth your time (if you like that kind of thing).

Tread Softly Stranger features Diana Dors, a platinum bombshell called the British Marilynn Monroe, although probably closer to Jayne Mansfield. It starts with gambler George Baker leaving London to escape his bookie, for his hometown of Rawborough, a bleak industrial wasterland. His brother, Terence Morgan, has been diligently working away as an account at the steel mill. He has also been carrying on with Dors, a cabaret hostess who goes by the name Calico. It turns out Morgan has been skimming from the company to buy Calico jewelry, and now the audit is coming. He wants to rob the company to cover up the embezzlement, but Baker thinks he can win the money at the track. As you might guess, it all goes horribly wrong.

This movie isn’t really much of a noir - it’s more of a “kitchen sink” crime drama, depicting the sad and sordid life of the British lower classes in the 50s. But it does have Dors as a toothsome femme fatale, and a decent crime plot.

Girl in the News is an early Carol Reed film, and a bit more classically British. Margaret Lockwood is nurse to an invalid woman who is very depressed and has trouble sleeping. When Lockwood is out, the old woman manages to get out of bed and gulps a handful of sleeping pills, killing herself. Of course, Lockwood is blamed, especially when it comes out that she has been added to the will.

She is defended at trial by Barry K. Barnes, a bit of a Leslie Howard type. He gets her acquitted mainly on the grounds that “look at that face. Is that the face of a murderer?” But even though Barnes and Lockwood become friendly, she can tell he isn’t quite sure.

Although she is acquitted, she can’t get any nursing work because of suspicion (and she won’t touch the bequest). So she changes her name and gets a job nursing a sweet old man. However, his wife and butler recognize her and plot to kill the old man and frame her for it. So it’s back to court. This time, lawyer Barnes is going to need more than her pretty face to get her off.

SPOILER - it’s funny that the climax of both these films hinge on the same plot device. In both, there is a surprise witness who panics the perpetrators into confessing. But in both cases, it’s a bluff - the witness is blind.