Mantrap, 1953.
Directed by Terence Fisher.
Starring Paul Henreid, Lois Maxwell, Kieron Moore, Hugh Sinclair, Lloyd Lamble, Kay Kendall, Bill Travers, and Barbara Shelley.
SYNOPSIS:
A wrongly convicted murderer and a private detective team up to discover who really committed the crime the convict was imprisoned for.
Mervyn Speight (Kieron Moore) has escaped from prison after being convicted of a murder he says he did not commit. Speight’s wife Thelma (Lois Maxwell) is terrified that her husband will try to contact her and has changed her surname to that of her new lover, Victor Tasman (Bill Travers), but lawyer/private detective Hugo Bishop (Paul Henreid) is on the case and, driven by a hunch, thinks he can prove that Speight is not the real killer.
Based on the novel Queen in Danger by Elleston Trevor and directed by Hammer stalwart Terence Fisher, Mantrap is an earnest attempt by Hammer to replicate the noir thrillers from the US, where beautiful women in peril turned to a gumshoe in a trilby hat and long raincoat for help, usually in sparsely-lit offices or smoky jazz clubs. They get some of that right, as future Miss Moneypenny Lois Maxwell cuts a glamourous figure as Thelma Tasman, convinced her husband is a killer and suffering from all sorts of trauma caused by what she believes he did, and Paul Henreid is fantastic as Hugo Bishop, who knows from the off that Speight is an innocent man and he also knows he can prove it, but only if certain people turn up at certain times and behave in certain ways.
Of course, it all plays out as Bishop predicts but seeing as we know – or as good as know – that Speight is innocent then Mantrap is less of a whodunnit and more of a why-did-they-do it. The trouble with it is that the script is all over the place, bringing in several characters who may or may not play into Bishop’s theories, and it gets very confusing as to who is who and how they are connected to Thelma, as every man in London seems to know her or have a connection to her. Add to that some awful dialogue (“When I knew her, she was dead” says one character when questioned), lots of padding that goes nowhere and several underwritten red herrings, and Mantrap ends up being a lot of voices onscreen with not much in the way of forward momentum, especially as Bishop seems to know what is going on but doesn’t say because he needs to maintain the element of surprise.
The final few minutes are where it gets most interesting, and how Bishop gets his theory confirmed is a clever bit of callback writing, but by this time you’ve sat through over an hour of not a lot actually happening, which is a shame as there are things to like here. Paul Henreid has wonderful chemistry with his female co-stars, especially with Kay Kendall as his fiancé/secretary Vera, and his proto-Columbo approach is fun to watch, and when Terence Fisher goes for the noir-ish visuals the movie looks fantastic, but he doesn’t seem to go all in with that style, as if he lacks the confidence to compete with the bigger US titles. Fisher would, of course, go on to master his craft with the Gothic horror movies Hammer pioneered later in the decade, but here he feels like a director-for-hire trying out something that he has been asked to do, despite having a hand in the writing.
Naturally, Hammer have gone all out with the supplementary material, including featurettes that cover the filming locations, the Queen in Danger novel, behind-the-scenes footage, audio commentaries and a collector’s booklet featuring profiles on the main stars, but in this case the extras really are more interesting than the main feature, even down to the cool new artwork on the box.
Whatever the merits or failings of Mantrap, collectors are going to want to add their ever-increasing library of Hammer 4K box sets, but to casual viewers there is very little here to warrant spending serious money on it. Mantrap isn’t a bad movie, just an uneventful one that had all the ingredients necessary to work but somehow doesn’t manage to make good use of most of them. If you enjoyed Paul Henreid in Stolen Face then he is just as endearing here – possibly even more so – and seeing a pre-Bond Lois Maxwell in her one and only appearance for Hammer is something of a treat for movie fans, but aside from being the debut movie appearance for future Hammer scream queen Barbara Shelley, there is very little else going on to recommend Mantrap.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Chris Ward
