This 1951 drama-thriller from director Jacques Tourneur and veteran genre writer Philip MacDonald, which sees Ray Milland coming to grimy postwar Britain demanding answers about his brother’s death, is a gem: focused, fast-moving and a little eccentric. It is a British-set movie that takes us on a travelogue tour from the coast of Tampa, Florida, to London – and from there to Wales, the Scottish Highlands and Birmingham. There is a lovely scene shot on location in London’s Covent Garden, in the days of the fruit and veg market, with crowds of real people looking on.
There are no explicit action sequences: no shootouts, not even a punch-up. But it’s entirely absorbing with an undertow of mystery and tension, a mix of humour and seriousness that Alfred Hitchcock would have recognised and a streak of wayward romance that put me in mind of Powell and Pressburger. These comparisons are partly down to the casting – many actors here gave more well-known (though not necessarily better) performances for these other iconic directors – but also down to Circle of Danger being produced by the brilliant and formidable screenwriter Joan Harrison, a longtime associate of Hitchcock’s whose biography was published by Christina Lane in 2020 but who deserves much more attention from movie historians.
