blanche-2 I hate to see animals in films, I always worry that something awful will happen to them. I usually can figure out what will happen to the people. For those who are like me, I want to report that Monty is okay.Anyway, this was a good film starring Sally Gray and Robert Newton. Newton is Clive, a psychiatrist who surprises his wife (Gray) when she is with another man, Bill (Phil Brown, who worked in England later on after being blacklisted) an American.The next thing you see is Clive relaxing at his club. The newspapers are full of an American, Bill Kronin, who has gone missing. His wife thinks that Clive killed him. But has he? And if he hasn't, where is he?Suspenseful, dark thriller with excellent performances by Newton as the egomaniacal psychiatrist who believes he can outsmart Scotland Yard, Naughton Wayne as the Scotland Yard inspector who claims to be looking into the couple's missing dog, Monty, and Gray, as a wife who goes from man to man. Someone said the Newton character was sympathetic and she looked like a villain. Personally I can't blame her - Clive seemed like a manipulative cold fish.Well done by a director familiar with noir, Edward Dmytryk. Newton would die of alcoholism six years later, and Gray would marry a Lord, retire, and live to age 91. Kronin returned to the US after the blacklist and worked into his 80s. I don't know about Monty; he was cute, though.

Alex da Silva Successful psychiatrist Robert Newton (Clive) is fed up of his wife Sally Gray (Storm) and her philandering ways. He's got business to attend to and it involves her latest lover Phil Brown (Bill). Newton calmly says to Brown - "Have you ever heard of the straw that broke the camel's back? Well,......it's you" - before putting his pre-meditated plan into action. Superintendent Naunton Wayne (Finsbury) turns up about halfway through the film to try and figure things out.The film is a battle of wits between everyone involved and it makes for entertaining viewing. The film grips you from the start and doesn't let go. Robert Newton starts off as completely likable and delivers some great dialogue in his calm and controlled manner. I totally sympathized with him but I'm not sure I was meant to. He is that appealing. I did gradually swing round to Phil Brown's side, though, after all, Newton is crackers! Great scenes, great locations, great acting and a clever dog. There are unexpected plot twists but the ending is slightly ambiguous. I went for the interpretation that sees Sally Gray stay in character, ie, a tart.

Svengali-2001 A minor cast has probably stopped many people sitting down to watch this 1949 thriller....Well it shouldn't ... this is one of the classic thrillers of all time. Like most noir films, the story is simple yet complex, and the actors build the tension as the dialogue crackles with that pent up passion the British nurtured under Victoria and perfected with the stiff upper lip. Robert Newton does his role almost as his personal raison d'etre. Without his brilliance this may have been a "B" movie. This is a "A" film because it achieves everything it sets out to do.Murder is best served cold. You will have to find out for yourself whether this one is served with ice...

bmacv The British never really "got" noir; the few successes they showed (Night and the City, The Third Man) had American directors or casts to light, or darken, the way for them. Among those directors was Edward Dmytryk, who had started big in the noir cycle with Murder My Sweet, Cornered, and Crossfire but who fled to England in the fallout from the Hollywood witch-hunt -- in which he named names, including Jules Dassin, who directed Night and the City. (Luckily, Dmytryk later returned to Hollywood to helm The Sniper.) Obsession tells the story of a jealous psychiatrist (Robert Newton) with a faithless wife (Sally Gray); he's one of those hyperarticulate verbal sadists whom you want to cosh with a bumbershoot or choke with cucumber tea-sandwiches. He decides to wreak a hellish revenge on the latest of his wife's paramours (the basically harmless Phil Brown; the philandering wife is Sally Gray). He locks the poor Yank in a cellar somewhere in bombed-out London until he fills a bathtub with enough acid to destroy all traces of the corpse (transported daily to the dungeon, along with food and martinis, in hot-water bottles!). Somehow the wife's inquisitive mutt gets mixed up in his plans.... Obsession is very restrained and British in hinting at things that the Americans would shove in our faces, but pulling back in just the nick of time. Dmytryk plays with the conventions expertly, keeping the suspense taut without shocking the bejezus out of us. It's a good thriller that returns to an ordered cosmos with all the laws of fair play observed -- not the anarchic, primal universe of true film noir.