GB
1947
1hr 40mins
Dir: Lance Comfort
Starring: Robert Newton and Simone Simon
A railway signalman sees the murder of a man and steals his suitcase full of money
This crime drama is the English version of Henri Decoin’s L’Homme de Londres (‘The Man from London’), both of which are based on the 1947 novel Newhaven-Dieppe by Georges Simenon, though the film itself was directly based on Simenon’s novella Affairs of Destiny. Although it is supposed to be representing that at Newhaven, the signal box central to the story was in fact that at Folkestone Harbour, and despite the fact that a signalman and his box are central to the plot, the railway scenes are rather limited. There are a couple of shots of locomotives shunting plus a shot of a train leaving the Harbour station, but the scenes are all filmed at night making identification very difficult, though the locomotives are all likely to be ex-SECR in origin. The dockside scenes were filmed on Folkestone Harbour Pier with some clearer daytime sequences. Railway wagons are visible in a number of these shots along with a large steam crane and a shunting steam locomotive.
