There are some dogs in Hitchcock’s filmography, with some of the more notable missteps being the dry stretch from Marnie to Topaz. His feature after that period (and second-to-last overall) was Frenzy, a movie critically lauded for being an alleged return to form, but which I found to be simply a deeply unpleasant experience. 1957’s Town on Trial seems to foretell that movie, as it also concerns a strangler on the loose, though this one employs a woman’s nylon instead of Frenzy’s necktie.
Odd that Alec McCowan is in both pictures. In Hitchcock’s, he was a police detective. In the 1957 picture, he is one of the chief suspects, a damaged young man who lives with his mother past the age most men would have left the nest back then. His performance foretells some of Anthony Perkins’s in Psycho, leaving one with the impression this rather minor production somehow inspired two Hitchcock works.
There are two other men who are the most likely suspects, and those are Charles Coburn and Derek Farr. Coburn, as the town’s doctor with a secret, plays this role completely straight and without the undercurrent of mischievous glee he brought to so many roles, such as a con man in The Lady Eve. Farr is the nastier character, somebody not just with one secret, but whose entire existence is seemingly built on lies. Like a house of cards, it will only take one of those to be compromised to bring down the entire facade.
When the film begins after the police have obtained a confession, though we don’t know from which of those men (if not somebody else entirely). The statement obtained by police is read aloud by a detective for a typist to transcribe. Regular viewers of the time will recognize that voice as belonging to John Mills, father of Hayley and one of the finest actors of his generation. In flashback, we will see him investigate these serial killings.
From notes the killer leaves at the scenes, it appears they are obsessed with a particular passage from the Bible which concerns slaying harlots, which also brought to my mind Se7en. The first woman who is killed likely meets the definition of a harlot for many in the conservative town in which everything here happens. Magda Miller is a shapely, but rather coarse, young woman, summarized in narration as “she saw how the men watched her and the women hated her […] but she didn’t know she was going to die.” This is while all three of the chief suspects are all captured in the same shot as they raptly watch her playing tennis. Later, Mills asks Farr, who oversees the club where she was playing, how a woman like that was allowed admittance.
It isn’t that Mills was appalled by this breach of class barriers, but more that he is simply surprised. The fictional town of Oakley Place is snobbish. I was amused by the sign at the town’s entrance, reading “no accidents please”. How posh of a locale to ask you to please have your vehicular pile-up, something which apparently only happen to lesser mortals, outside the confines of their municipality, thank you very much.
The only crash we see is one that happens in less than a minute after a car leaves an establishment with illegal gambling. Margaretta Scott is woozy after this collision. Mills, who had been there after finding a matchbook for the place in Miller’s belongings, gives her a ride home. She is terrified to have this indiscretion revealed to father Geoffrey Keen, and rightly so. As regards her drinking Mills provides her this advice: “When you get near your old man, don’t breathe on him too hard.”
Not unlike the first victim, Mills’s detective is also of a lower level of class than the residents of Oakley Place, a fish-of-water who isn’t afraid to ruffle feathers in order to prevent the likely murder of more young women. He sees this town as just as corrupt and scandalous as the rougher places he known, only they keep those elements more tidily concealed: “This place, you have to dig to get the dirt. And, once you get there, it is just as dirty.”
It is a tone which permeates the film, foreshadowing such eventual works as Blue Velvet by several decades. There are even things only alluded to which surprised me for a film of this vintage, such as mortician Raymond Huntley telling Mills how careful one must be performing an autopsy, let they become like a colleague who nicked one of their fingers during one and the infection cost them an arm. It is in that autopsy, Huntley discovers Miller was two months pregnant.
Mills has a strong conviction who that illegitimate father is, and confronts Farr with this while the man’s wife is in the room. That is harsh, and a good example of how Mills isn’t perfect, sometimes crossing the line into unnecessary provocation.
It is moments like that which prompt Barbara Bates to upbraid him, recommending he take a gentler approach. But then, she is the niece of Coburn, who is a major suspect. She also rather inexplicably provides a false alibi for Farr for the night of Miller’s death.
A pleasant element of the plot is a budding romance between Mills and Bates. A meet-cute has him fumbling to ask her out while she is working in a hospital playroom for the child patients, and he tries to entertain one of the boys. Mills to Bates: “I was hoping you’d have lunch with me.” Bates: “Who are you asking—him or me?” They will have a date later which is one of those pure and beautiful scenes I love in cinema, a “dinner” that is just cheese, crackers, and an assortment of condiments. I was reminded of a line I love from 1943’s Thursday’s Child: “I wonder why things taste extra delicious after midnight.”
The character in Town on Trial who seems to get the most out of life is Scott. Towards the end of the runtime, she lets loose on the dancefloor at a formal gala, doing a solo dance feral with sexual energy. The reactions we see from those who leave a wide circle around her for this exhibition seem to mirror how Miller was described earlier, various degrees of contempt and lust—and you just know at least one man in attendance is experiencing a conflicting mixture of both. Scott’s unrestrained performance is burst of joy and freedom in rather staid confines; alas, she will pay dearly for this, once again like Miller before her. All this is foreshadowed in an earlier bit where she goes to bed with two nylons draped over the back of a chair. A cut to the next morning, and there is only one. If only Hitchcock, the alleged master of suspense, could have worked such similar material with such tact.
Dir: John Guillermin
Starring John Mills, Charles Coburn, Barbara Bates, Derek Farr, Alec McCowen
Watched on Powerhouse/Indicator (region free) blu-ray