Ma’s come back, Molly. I was going to tell you. At an isolated Yorkshire farmhouse Finlay (Lee Patterson) drags in the unconscious body of a woman (Sheila Raynor) who’s crashed her car due to his carelessness; while his sister Molly (Lana Morris) is in her bedroom. She hears him and he declares to her it’s their late mother and she plays along with it. In the morning she runs to the main road where she finds Tom (Peter Dyneley) repairing a telegraph pole. He can tell she needs help. He stays around and hides in the barn where she tries to explain about the woman who needs medical assistance but her brother’s condition is tricky. When the local Police Constable (Robert Cawdron) arrives to tell Molly and Finlay there’s a motorcycle parked near their gate at the main road Finlay gets suspicious and starts searching the barn for the intruder … He cheated you of the one thing in life you lived for. According to Steve Chibnall & Brian MacFarlane’s The British B Film, this neat chiller is one of a cycle of ‘shorter’ films made at Beaconsfield under Leslie Parkyn and Julian Wintle which they preferred not to call B movies, and are often unusual in their evasion of genre convention and their attention to detail (131). This evocation of psychosis by Canadian actor Patterson, who was soon to find fame Stateside on the TV show Surfside 6, is all the more exceptional for the mise en scene, mostly in lamplit shadowy darkness shot by Michael Reed, frequently in close ups. Tom isn’t having any of Molly’s poetic description: He’s like a boy with a wounded bird, she claims. You mean he’s mad, is his response. When Finlay pokes a rifle in the face of the local copper who’s arrived to announce that there’s a motorcycle parked at the front gate it ratchets up the tension a hundred per cent and then there’s a race against time to save the woman, save Tom and stop Finlay on the predicted rampage of revenge against their late father. Perhaps the game is declared too quickly by making Finlay so clearly deranged from the start. Morris is properly scared, tentative and brave as is required and plays a permanently strained character, trying to do the best for everyone concerned. The ending is ironic. Morris didn’t make another film for a decade and that’s another story of a dodgy brother’s psychopathy, I Start Counting. It would be her final film. She died in 1998 directly after the first stage performance of a Barbara Taylor Bradford adaptation. Imperfect this may be but it has atmosphere in abundance, aided by the melodramatic score from Humphrey Searle. Written and directed by John Kruse. When no one needs you you’re nothing
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