Director: Lance Comfort
Stars: Richard Attenborough, Cathy O’Donnell, Derek Farr, Ian Hunter, Maurice Denham, Harry Welchman, Totti Truman Taylor
Tom (Attenborough) is a cab driver who gets accused of murdering a girl that played an April Fool’s joke on him.
It shows how times have changed I suppose but the April Fool’s jokes shown at the beginning were terrible. Sending a note through a letterbox marked ‘Urgent’, then when it’s opened it reads ‘April Fool’s’, pretending that you lost your doll and crying to get someone to look for it, shouting and pointing to the sky to get people to stop what they’re doing and look up. Those rapscallions!
Seriously though, the movie begins with a whimsical tone but soon turns to a dark tension as Tom is accused of murder. One thing I found weirdly interesting is the attitudes to justice. At one point one of the characters implies that Tom has to prove his innocence, which goes against the usual ‘innocent until proven guilty’. I’m not sure whether it was just the time or whether this film got things very wrong, but the legal defence was shocking. They expected to defend the case without even meeting the client! Is this really how things were done? Surely they’d at least want to advise him on how to act and what to say and what questions he could expect? Very strange. At one point the judge welcomes a young boy to sit by him as well, and I’m not sure that’s proper protocol either!
I thought O’Donnell was good as the wife who tried her hardest to support her husband, even though most of the time she wasn’t allowed to see him. I also enjoyed how the film showed that life goes on around these things. One humorous moment had a woman describe a grisly murder but quickly segue into happily chatting about the whether as if the two subjects were related. Often throughout the film ordinary life is depicted as being more important than the case, whether it’s the judge’s wife being in hospital or a witness rushing out of court so she can get her husband some underwear that are on sale. Taken in isolation these can feel like undeveloped subplots as they don’t really go anywhere or have an impact on the main story, but I think it’s a comment on how people tend to get obsessed over these trials but return so quickly to ordinary life, when really a man’s life hangs in the balance.
There are a couple of aspects that I think could have improved the film as well. When I read the synopsis I assumed that Eight O’ Clock Walk referred to the time when the girl was murdered, but I read that it’s actually about the walk to the gallows. However, I feel they could have easily change the time of the walk in the film so that it matched the reference and gave the title a double meaning. There were also a couple of shots early on of a shadowy figure that made it clear Tom wasn’t the murderer, and while this sets up the finale it does drain the film of some tension during the middle.
I quite enjoyed it though, although it’s not one I’d rave about. The courtroom antics are certainly different than what we come to expect from modern legal dramas so the film is certainly a product of its time.