Obsession

Certainly Dmytryk's best British film, made after his blacklist exile and before freedom from the Hollywood system led him into the pretensions of Give Us This Day. Adapted by Alec Coppel from his own novel, it's an intriguing 'perfect murder' thriller in which an obsessively jealous husband lures his rival to a cellar on a bomb site, keeping him chained there until the coast is clear and his own grimly meticulous preparations for disposing of the body in an acid bath are complete. Perhaps only Buñuel could have done justice to the flavour as the avenger sadistically torments his victim during the wait, and an odd intimacy starts to spring up between them. Here both dialogue and performances (with Newton doing much less eye-rolling than usual) stay a little too close to the surface, but it has much the same narrative grip as Dmytryk's earlier Hollywood movies like Murder My Sweet, Cornered and Crossfire.