- Just once, wouldn't you love to see one of those smug master detectives fall completely on his face? I treasure Holmes and adore Poirot as much as anyone, but watching them ace one mystery after another sometimes makes those of us on the mortal plane feel a bit inferior. Happily, Sidney Gilliat's Green for Danger is a film that recognizes the limits of deductive reasoning and sets up its lovably arrogant sleuth Inspector Cockrill (Alastair Sim) for the fall. Granted, Cockrill doesn't completely botch the job, but he certainly makes a misstep at the film's end that the audience isn't likely to forget.
- The setting is England during the Second World War, and the plot reads like an episode of General Hospital taken to a murderous extreme. A surgeon named Eden (Leo Genn) and the anesthesiologist Barnes (Trevor Howard) are in love with the same Nurse Linley (Sally Gray). The ever-hovering Sister Bates (Judy Campbell) has eyes only for Eden, but she's spotted him in Linley's eager arms. In the meantime, it's not completely clear why the arrival of an injured postman (Moore Marriott) has both Nurses Sanson (Rosamund John) and Woods (Megs Jenkins) worried, but the man's subsequent death on the operating table is suspicious, to say the least. When Sister Bates announces as much to the entire hospital at a Christmas party, she soon becomes the next victim. Enter Inspector Cockrill.
- Like Sims' most famous character, Ebeneezer Scrooge, Cockrill always takes the time to properly revel in his egotism. From the moment he arrives at the crime scene, he constantly levels half-joking accusations at the hospital workers, all of whom may have had some reason or another to want the seemingly well-liked postman dead. In one of the film's funniest moments, Cockrill even materializes at a late-night garden rendezvous to complete Shakespearean quotes exchanged between secret lovers. The trouble is, evidence is mounting that Cockrill's cocksureness may be completely unwarranted. From his constant cowering at the threat of dropping bombs to his failure to correctly anticipate the conclusion of his nightly murder mystery novel, the audience may well suspect that Cockrill's wry narration is little more than a lot of hot air. Let's just hope his theatrical crime-solving methods aren't placing even more lives at risk.
- While Green for Danger may be most widely remembered for Cockrill's aforementioned failure, or "comparative failure" as he puts it, to fit all of the puzzle pieces together, the film has much else to recommend it, too. Especially impressive are its occasional deviations into expressionism with characters whose surgical masks reduce them to shifting sets of eyes and a murderer who flashes scalpels in a darkened operating theater, paralyzing his victims with fear. Furthermore, the film counterbalances these moments of abstract horror with truly funny bursts of wit that are most reminiscent of Gilliat's script work for The Lady Vanishes. The real star of the show, however, is Sims, who somehow infuses his overbearing old drawing-room detective with an undeniable charm. If only the modern interpretations of Sherlock Holmes did that, maybe it wouldn't matter whether they got every case precisely right.
- Based on a novel by Christianna Brand.
