*Caution - Enormous spoilers*
A young bank clerk called Geoffrey Dent (John Barry) steals £2000 from his bank for his girlfriend Laura Wilson (uncredited) who tells him it is for her brother who she claims has fallen prey to a blackmailer. In reality, Laura is working for a ruthless criminal called Ginter (John Le Mesurier) and the pair are working a scam in order to take all the money Dent has and to steal money from the bank for them. However, Laura attempts to double cross Ginter and run away with the money herself and he kills her. Dent immediately becomes the chief suspect since he discovered the body and he was seen running away by the caretaker at her apartment block. He flees to Cheltenham and takes a room in a boarding house run by Julie McKelvin (Maureen Riscoe) whose father happens to be a senior police officer. However, Ginter has followed Dent to Cheltenham as he believes he has got the £2000 meaning his life is in danger...
Long thought lost, this modest yet sometimes effective crime programmer is notable as one of the earliest features to be directed by John Gilling. There is some mild tension in the scenes at the boarding house breakfast table where Riscoe's assorted eccentric lodgers (including Colonel Peabody who listens at keyholes with his hearing aid) are discussing the murder case, which is splashed across the front page of their morning papers. Barry struggles to prevent giving himself away as the absconding bank clerk and his edginess is betrayed by a parrot that belongs to one of the guests and keeps mimicking everything that is said in the conversation. Meanwhile, the suspense is kept up by Riscoe who is falling in love with Barry and her boyfriend, the reporter Tony (Ivan Craig), is jealous and is determined to prove his theory that Barry is the criminal on the run.
But, what distinguishes A Matter Of Murder and, I have to say, I wasn't expecting much from it is its particularly shocking and tragic climax. *BIG SPOILER HERE* At the end, the young and naive bank clerk dies after being cornered by Ginter and a bullet from his gun finds its mark. We are stunned when we learn that the poor guy lost his life for nothing since the police (including Riscoe's father) knew that he was innocent all along but allowed him to go on the run since it would bring Ginter out into the open as they knew he'd go after the money. Oh, incidentally, the police had already recovered it from its hiding place in the murdered girl's flat. The film's big punch is the fact that the police allowed an innocent young man to die for nothing as they could have caught their man by conventional police methods. People who have followed John Gilling's work closely might spot some similarities between this and his Jayne Mansfield crime thriller The Challenge (1960).
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