The Hidden Room (aka Obsession)

American director Jules Dassin’s British noir follows Harry (Richard Widmark), a small-time hustler dreaming of dominating the wrestling racket. When he double-crosses London’s underworld, his lies become a death warrant in the city’s merciless alleys.

Shot in the UK while Dassin was fleeing persecution and the Hollywood blacklist, Night and the City is the first of several films he made abroad in Britain, France, and Greece. This rare original nitrate print is of the British release version of the film, which runs six minutes longer than the US release and features alternate opening and closing scenes as well as a score by prolific British composer Benjamin Frankel.

For all of her 30 years, nothing has stopped headstrong Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) and her persistent march toward her goals. Her latest: holy matrimony with a business magnate twice her age, whom she hopes to wed in the Scottish Hebrides. When relentless storms prevent her from completing her journey, she succumbs to the charms of the place, and of one local in particular, who might be the first person ever to slow her down.

Written in four days and praised by Raymond Chandler for its evocation of the senses, this romantic tale reaches folkloric heights thanks to detailed location shooting and the unmatched world-building of production designer Alfred Junge.

Wounded IRA fugitive Johnny McQueen (James Mason) flees through wintry Belfast, encountering strangers while reuniting with his lover. Over 24 hours, the exhausted McQueen displays the growing desperation of man with nowhere left to turn.

Shooting on the streets of West Belfast in Northern Ireland and in Hackney, London, filmmaker Carol Reed employs the evocative locations and stark cinematography that would come to define his later film The Third Man (1949). Few directors in the 1940s matched Reed’s fatalistic intensity, transforming mundane details into evocations of an unbalanced world.

This remarkable London-set crime drama tells the story of Dan MacDonald (Bonar Colleano) and Johnny Lambert (Earl Cameron), two seamen entangled in a smuggling racket. Filmmaker Basil Dearden, one of Britain’s finest talents, directs with his typical rigor and makes a bold choice for its time by casting Black actor Cameron as the romantic lead. Dearden lends an eerie despair to London’s winding streets, famous bridges, dark tunnels, and massive cathedrals by virtually emptying them of other people, creating a sense of isolation that echoes the region’s prevailing postwar sentiments.

Based on H. G. Wells’s story of former lovers who rekindle their romance in Switzerland, this is one of David Lean’s most passionate love stories, elevated by Guy Green’s lyrical location cinematography in London, Switzerland, and France. Mary Justin (Ann Todd) is married to her jealous husband, Howard (Claude Rains), but finds herself besotted with old flame Steven Stratton (Trevor Howard). A continuation of the themes explored in the devastating Brief Encounter (1945), the film embraces a female perspective, allowing the viewer to hear Mary’s interior monologue as she navigates the passion she wants and stability she needs.  

In the bombed-out ruins of London, a boy accidentally causes his friend’s death and is blackmailed by a criminal into aiding a robbery. This unflinching drama marked filmmaker J. Lee Thompson’s breakthrough, showcasing a bold, gritty imagination that would later be fully realized in his harrowing Cape Fear (1962). Slapped with the adults-only X certificate on its initial release—meaning lead actor Andrew Ray wasn’t allowed to see it—the film’s most disturbing scenes of childhood peril still resonate with the same tension and terror as they did more than 70 years ago.

A young Richard Attenborough, embodying the quintessential smooth-talking, suave-dressing gent of British cinema, plays Pinkie, a hoodlum forced to marry the witness to a murder he committed. The script, based on English writer Graham Greene’s novel, was cowritten by Greene and Terence Rattigan, one of the country’s most popular dramatists.

Produced by the Boulting brothers—John would direct, Roy would produce—and shot with an expressionistic, noir style by Harry Waxman (Sapphire, 1959) on location in the seaside town of Brighton, the picture was a box office success and a critical flop, with its more violent sequences causing moral panic throughout the country—the film was even banned in parts of Wales.  

Hell Is a City is a superb policier featuring Stanley Baker as Inspector Martineau, who hunts a murderer (John Crawford) while grappling with his crumbling marriage in the northern town of Manchester. Soaked in a jazzy score and paced with punchy dialogue, the film is one of several in this program in which an American is central to the story’s primary conflict (see also Night and the City, 1950, and Obsession, 1947).

This crime thriller is one of more than a dozen features made by the prolific Val Guest for Hammer Film Productions, the London-based company responsible for the bulk of England’s genre pictures from the 1930s into the 1970s. The film culminates in one of British crime cinema’s most thrilling climaxes, shot on location atop a building in Manchester.