Lively, entertaining reviews of, and essays on, old and newer films and everything relating to them, written by professional author William Schoell.

Thursday, March 28, 2024

JIGSAW (1962)

JIGSAW (1962). Produced, directed, and written by Val Guest. 

A young woman (Moira Redmond) makes the mistake of telling her unseen lover that she is two months pregnant, and perhaps now would be a good time for him to break from his wife. Unfortunately, this gent has a different idea on his mind. Some time later part of the lady's corpse is found in the garage of a rented house. Detective Fellows (Jack Warner of Dear Murderer) and Detective Wilks (Ronald Lewis) are part of a team assigned to not only find out who killed the woman but who she was. Doing dogged police work (although it seems to take forever for them to bring in someone to work with an identikit) leads to mistaken identities and bum steers. Finally they discover the killer has been hiding in plain sight for quite some time. 

Jigsaw is a very absorbing British police procedural with Warner playing an amiable, highly professional detective. Lewis is also good, but he's always more interesting as a bad guy, such as in Stop Me Before I Kill! Yolande Donlan -- who was married to director Val Guest --  really makes an impression as another woman who dallies with the killer, and there's notable work from Redmond, Michael Goodliffe [The Gorgon], John Barron, John Le Mesurier [Jack the Ripper] and others. This is not another British copy of Psycho and focuses much more on the solving of the crime than it does on the crime itself. Guest also directed The Day the Earth Caught Fire

Verdict: Suspenseful British mystery. ***.  

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