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I was your mind
I find myself compelled to write about The Teckman Mystery (1954) not so much because of anything it did as because of something it almost did and irritates me incredibly that it didn't. I can't even find out if the original BBC TV serial did better because it's been burninated. Better archival standards and practices, history! Some of us at least want to give the benefit of the doubt.
As adapted for the big screen by Francis Durbridge and James Matthews from the former's The Teckman Biography (1953–54), the film is the kind of semi-international thriller you can agreeably blow an hour and a half on if you're all out of Eric Ambler. Reluctantly recalled to London from his usual haunts in the south of France, best-selling novelist Philip Chance (John Justin) is approached by his publisher to write a biography of Martin Teckman, the brilliant test pilot who wanted nothing more than to discover the limits of humanity in the sky and got his wish six months ago when his top-secret experimental plane the F.109 broke up around him on its maiden flight. "He was killed, of course—at the moment he achieved his life's ambition. It's a job for a novelist, Philip!" Despite this appeal to his vanity as well as his sales figures, the playboyish Philip continues to refuse until the dossier he's handed on his potential subject reminds him that the beautiful blonde he met on the flight over was the dead man's sister, Helen Teckman (Margaret Leighton). At once he's interested and at once the audience begins to doubt that he'll live to complete the book. Someone has already wrecked his Belgravia flat, though he can't imagine what they were searching for. The mysterious editor of an American lifestyle magazine (Meier Tzelniker) seems willing to offer him a quite extraordinary sum to write a column from Berlin if he can postpone his commitments and leave immediately. He interviews a once respected, now forcibly retired engineer who knew Teckman as far back as the RAF (George Coulouris) and that night the man turns up dead, knifed and dumped on the writer's carpet like a warning, the space-age streamlined model of the F.109 still in his hand. It's one thing to have to explain a burglary to Detective Inspector Hilton (Duncan Lamont); it's another when the dry, attentive man introduced vaguely as "a colleague of mine, Major Harris" (Roland Culver) gets involved. Philip wasn't even the original biographer of Martin Teckman. She'll be in hospital for weeks yet, recovering from an unexpected hit-and-run. Altogether Teckman seems to be a dangerous name just to know, let alone raise the conspiracy-theorish suspicion that his fatal crash wasn't all it seemed. If Britain's answer to the Bell X-1 didn't disintegrate in mid-air, as the official inquiry concluded from the few scattered fragments of fuselage found at the appropriate site: "It landed somewhere." And if it did, where does that leave its pilot, not just geographically, but more importantly in the early years of the Cold War, politically?
I actually watched this movie because I recognized its director from Three Cases of Murder (1955), an anthology film of weird tales linked by the hosting of Eamonn Andrews and the acting of Alan Badel: Wendy Toye, who had worked with Badel on her Cannes-honored debut short The Stranger Left No Card (1952), was responsible for "The Picture," a nastily soft-spoken little creepshow that starts with a museum lecture and ends as cold as damnation. I feel for her with The Teckman Mystery as her first feature assignment. Working with the well-made shadows of cinematographer Jack Hildyard, Toye invests the cat-and-mouse material with a suitable blend of tension and light comedy, the gentleman amateur with the net of what he doesn't know tightening around him, but no amount of scene-by-scene effective atmosphere can disguise the fact that the script seems to know no other means of maintaining suspense than withholding information from the audience and none too subtly, either. Every time our hero verges on learning something that might clarify the murky, swirling mysteries of Martin Teckman and the F.109 and the "subversive" interests who can't seem to decide between buying or bumping him off, he finds the authorities professionally shtum or Helen too near tears to talk or a suspect hits him on the head instead of answering his questions and by the time he's in a position to prove their reality, another trail's gone literally dead. The plot feints at the suggestion of a government cover-up, then drops it in favor of hazily emerging treason; the cast are laid out like a smorgasbord of red herrings, rotating mistrust among everyone from Philip's own tolerant publisher (Raymond Huntley) to the dark-haired secretary at the airworks (Jane Wenham) who claims to have been secretly Teckman's wife. It's all so obfuscatory, it feels lampshaded outright by Philip when he complains, "All my life I've had a golden rule: 'Take no chances, Chance' . . . It's perfectly useless! How can I take no chances when I haven't the faintest idea what's going on?" I thought the first rule of suspense was the bomb under the table, not a profound caginess over the fact of the table at all. I can take a certain amount of this technique when it's less contrived, but it still annoys me more often than not and annoys me especially when some of the information the film is withholding would make the narrative far more compelling if the audience were let in on it sooner.
By the top of the second act, the audience has good reason to suspect that Martin Teckman is alive and in London, but it takes until the third act for Philip and the audience to be afforded the opportunity to meet him (Michael Medwin), nervously shredding a cigarette at the restaurant where he's slipped in on another man's reservation. He claims to have spent the last six months on the run in Europe and looks it, one of those young faces harrowed to wire; he gives what certainly sound like straight answers when it comes to the fate of the F.109, but his reticence after asking Philip to pass a letter to his sister finally causes the novelist to explode, "Yes, but you don't go to the police, do you, Teckman? That's what's so damn funny about you. You give me this long story about crashing a plane, hiding and being hunted, so that I should think you've become a patriotic Englishman, but the one thing you don't do is tell the police!" He can understand Helen's refusals: what girl wants to incriminate her brother, even a traitorous one? Martin with his anonymous phone calls, his cloak-and-dagger double-talk, his disappearing into the night, just looks like a rat trying to have it both ways. Skip forward to the denouement, when the camera like Helen tailed by the police finds her brother leaning on the rail of Tower Bridge; he takes her by the arm and hustles her into the tourist crowd at the Tower of London, where underneath the routine spiel of ravens and the armory they whisper urgently about the danger he's put himself in coming back to England and the place he's fixed for her on a boat leaving that night and all of a sudden the tall, slender lioness of Helen rears back in contempt for her resolute, stubbled brother and his plans: "You fool! You never made up your mind in your life. I was your mind. And I still am." It's a bombshell. Maybe not quite as twenty tons of TNT as the reveal of Raymond Shaw's American operator in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), but it still lands. She's his handler, the agent of the "certain political group" that Major Harris knew had persuaded Martin to turn over his research to the never-named Soviets, the one he betrayed when he changed his mind at the last minute and let the F.109 crash on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. It's as obvious in hindsight as her derailing of Philip's investigations and it's topped almost immediately by a further revelation of the relationship between the siblings. "You've always had your own way," Martin concedes to his furious sister, "all our lives . . . All my courage came from you. It was your courage that flew the plane." As far back as the first scenes of this movie, we were told that Martin Teckman "lived for aeroplanes. Not just flying, but the theory of it as well, all the stresses and strains on the metal, the building of high-speed machines. He had a brilliant brain." But if they both acknowledge the sister with her fashion designs and not the brother with his blueprints as the driving force of the pair, how much of that fascination, that famous ambition was Martin and how much Helen Teckman? He acquitted himself honorably in the war; did she see him through defending his country as adamantly as she would have seen him through betraying it? What even turned her to treason in the first place—principles, money, disillusion, boredom? Couldn't she just have flown for the ATA? These are not small questions and they deserve better than to be dropped into the last nine minutes of a film when there's no time left for anything more than a shootout, a chase into the docklands, and a dramatic fall from a warehouse's third story into water as unforgiving as concrete. Even the hint of incest goes by too fast to be relevant, when Helen says weakly that she can't forgive Martin for marrying without telling her and Philip retorts, "Don't you mean that you can't forgive Martin for marrying?" Had the film disclosed any of this information earlier, it could have relieved the willful obtuseness of the plot and generated some splendid tension, less even from Philip's innocence than from the battle of wills between the Teckmans; we might have gotten some idea of Helen beyond the specter of Communism wearing the New Look. Instead we're just hit with a climactic infodump. It's not even satisfying as the final click of the puzzle because it's more like finding out that half the pieces were under the couch to begin with. There's nothing for the audience to do except agree with Grunkle Stan.
Knowing that the original version of this story was a six-part serial in half-hour installments, I strongly suspect that the pacing of the film got badly crunched in the condensation, but since I can't compare the two for myself, I'm just left feeling sorry that The Teckman Mystery wastes so much of its time decoying its audience with ignorance when it could have made us anxious with what we knew. I almost watched David Lean's The Sound Barrier (1952) as a palate cleanser, then remembered how much history of aviation that one falsifies and thought better. If it goes by on TCM or TPTV, I am sure this one is equally flimsy on the aerospace front, but the worst the rest of it can do is not be mid-century TV. I always enjoy location shooting for its ghosts of place; I have never not enjoyed Margaret Leighton even when, as here, she's more interesting than most of her scenes. I don't hold it against Wendy Toye. It may not have been a promising feature debut, but she went on to collaborate twice on short subjects with Ronald Searle, so I think she came out all right. This chance brought to you by my patriotic backers at Patreon.
As adapted for the big screen by Francis Durbridge and James Matthews from the former's The Teckman Biography (1953–54), the film is the kind of semi-international thriller you can agreeably blow an hour and a half on if you're all out of Eric Ambler. Reluctantly recalled to London from his usual haunts in the south of France, best-selling novelist Philip Chance (John Justin) is approached by his publisher to write a biography of Martin Teckman, the brilliant test pilot who wanted nothing more than to discover the limits of humanity in the sky and got his wish six months ago when his top-secret experimental plane the F.109 broke up around him on its maiden flight. "He was killed, of course—at the moment he achieved his life's ambition. It's a job for a novelist, Philip!" Despite this appeal to his vanity as well as his sales figures, the playboyish Philip continues to refuse until the dossier he's handed on his potential subject reminds him that the beautiful blonde he met on the flight over was the dead man's sister, Helen Teckman (Margaret Leighton). At once he's interested and at once the audience begins to doubt that he'll live to complete the book. Someone has already wrecked his Belgravia flat, though he can't imagine what they were searching for. The mysterious editor of an American lifestyle magazine (Meier Tzelniker) seems willing to offer him a quite extraordinary sum to write a column from Berlin if he can postpone his commitments and leave immediately. He interviews a once respected, now forcibly retired engineer who knew Teckman as far back as the RAF (George Coulouris) and that night the man turns up dead, knifed and dumped on the writer's carpet like a warning, the space-age streamlined model of the F.109 still in his hand. It's one thing to have to explain a burglary to Detective Inspector Hilton (Duncan Lamont); it's another when the dry, attentive man introduced vaguely as "a colleague of mine, Major Harris" (Roland Culver) gets involved. Philip wasn't even the original biographer of Martin Teckman. She'll be in hospital for weeks yet, recovering from an unexpected hit-and-run. Altogether Teckman seems to be a dangerous name just to know, let alone raise the conspiracy-theorish suspicion that his fatal crash wasn't all it seemed. If Britain's answer to the Bell X-1 didn't disintegrate in mid-air, as the official inquiry concluded from the few scattered fragments of fuselage found at the appropriate site: "It landed somewhere." And if it did, where does that leave its pilot, not just geographically, but more importantly in the early years of the Cold War, politically?
I actually watched this movie because I recognized its director from Three Cases of Murder (1955), an anthology film of weird tales linked by the hosting of Eamonn Andrews and the acting of Alan Badel: Wendy Toye, who had worked with Badel on her Cannes-honored debut short The Stranger Left No Card (1952), was responsible for "The Picture," a nastily soft-spoken little creepshow that starts with a museum lecture and ends as cold as damnation. I feel for her with The Teckman Mystery as her first feature assignment. Working with the well-made shadows of cinematographer Jack Hildyard, Toye invests the cat-and-mouse material with a suitable blend of tension and light comedy, the gentleman amateur with the net of what he doesn't know tightening around him, but no amount of scene-by-scene effective atmosphere can disguise the fact that the script seems to know no other means of maintaining suspense than withholding information from the audience and none too subtly, either. Every time our hero verges on learning something that might clarify the murky, swirling mysteries of Martin Teckman and the F.109 and the "subversive" interests who can't seem to decide between buying or bumping him off, he finds the authorities professionally shtum or Helen too near tears to talk or a suspect hits him on the head instead of answering his questions and by the time he's in a position to prove their reality, another trail's gone literally dead. The plot feints at the suggestion of a government cover-up, then drops it in favor of hazily emerging treason; the cast are laid out like a smorgasbord of red herrings, rotating mistrust among everyone from Philip's own tolerant publisher (Raymond Huntley) to the dark-haired secretary at the airworks (Jane Wenham) who claims to have been secretly Teckman's wife. It's all so obfuscatory, it feels lampshaded outright by Philip when he complains, "All my life I've had a golden rule: 'Take no chances, Chance' . . . It's perfectly useless! How can I take no chances when I haven't the faintest idea what's going on?" I thought the first rule of suspense was the bomb under the table, not a profound caginess over the fact of the table at all. I can take a certain amount of this technique when it's less contrived, but it still annoys me more often than not and annoys me especially when some of the information the film is withholding would make the narrative far more compelling if the audience were let in on it sooner.
By the top of the second act, the audience has good reason to suspect that Martin Teckman is alive and in London, but it takes until the third act for Philip and the audience to be afforded the opportunity to meet him (Michael Medwin), nervously shredding a cigarette at the restaurant where he's slipped in on another man's reservation. He claims to have spent the last six months on the run in Europe and looks it, one of those young faces harrowed to wire; he gives what certainly sound like straight answers when it comes to the fate of the F.109, but his reticence after asking Philip to pass a letter to his sister finally causes the novelist to explode, "Yes, but you don't go to the police, do you, Teckman? That's what's so damn funny about you. You give me this long story about crashing a plane, hiding and being hunted, so that I should think you've become a patriotic Englishman, but the one thing you don't do is tell the police!" He can understand Helen's refusals: what girl wants to incriminate her brother, even a traitorous one? Martin with his anonymous phone calls, his cloak-and-dagger double-talk, his disappearing into the night, just looks like a rat trying to have it both ways. Skip forward to the denouement, when the camera like Helen tailed by the police finds her brother leaning on the rail of Tower Bridge; he takes her by the arm and hustles her into the tourist crowd at the Tower of London, where underneath the routine spiel of ravens and the armory they whisper urgently about the danger he's put himself in coming back to England and the place he's fixed for her on a boat leaving that night and all of a sudden the tall, slender lioness of Helen rears back in contempt for her resolute, stubbled brother and his plans: "You fool! You never made up your mind in your life. I was your mind. And I still am." It's a bombshell. Maybe not quite as twenty tons of TNT as the reveal of Raymond Shaw's American operator in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), but it still lands. She's his handler, the agent of the "certain political group" that Major Harris knew had persuaded Martin to turn over his research to the never-named Soviets, the one he betrayed when he changed his mind at the last minute and let the F.109 crash on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. It's as obvious in hindsight as her derailing of Philip's investigations and it's topped almost immediately by a further revelation of the relationship between the siblings. "You've always had your own way," Martin concedes to his furious sister, "all our lives . . . All my courage came from you. It was your courage that flew the plane." As far back as the first scenes of this movie, we were told that Martin Teckman "lived for aeroplanes. Not just flying, but the theory of it as well, all the stresses and strains on the metal, the building of high-speed machines. He had a brilliant brain." But if they both acknowledge the sister with her fashion designs and not the brother with his blueprints as the driving force of the pair, how much of that fascination, that famous ambition was Martin and how much Helen Teckman? He acquitted himself honorably in the war; did she see him through defending his country as adamantly as she would have seen him through betraying it? What even turned her to treason in the first place—principles, money, disillusion, boredom? Couldn't she just have flown for the ATA? These are not small questions and they deserve better than to be dropped into the last nine minutes of a film when there's no time left for anything more than a shootout, a chase into the docklands, and a dramatic fall from a warehouse's third story into water as unforgiving as concrete. Even the hint of incest goes by too fast to be relevant, when Helen says weakly that she can't forgive Martin for marrying without telling her and Philip retorts, "Don't you mean that you can't forgive Martin for marrying?" Had the film disclosed any of this information earlier, it could have relieved the willful obtuseness of the plot and generated some splendid tension, less even from Philip's innocence than from the battle of wills between the Teckmans; we might have gotten some idea of Helen beyond the specter of Communism wearing the New Look. Instead we're just hit with a climactic infodump. It's not even satisfying as the final click of the puzzle because it's more like finding out that half the pieces were under the couch to begin with. There's nothing for the audience to do except agree with Grunkle Stan.
Knowing that the original version of this story was a six-part serial in half-hour installments, I strongly suspect that the pacing of the film got badly crunched in the condensation, but since I can't compare the two for myself, I'm just left feeling sorry that The Teckman Mystery wastes so much of its time decoying its audience with ignorance when it could have made us anxious with what we knew. I almost watched David Lean's The Sound Barrier (1952) as a palate cleanser, then remembered how much history of aviation that one falsifies and thought better. If it goes by on TCM or TPTV, I am sure this one is equally flimsy on the aerospace front, but the worst the rest of it can do is not be mid-century TV. I always enjoy location shooting for its ghosts of place; I have never not enjoyed Margaret Leighton even when, as here, she's more interesting than most of her scenes. I don't hold it against Wendy Toye. It may not have been a promising feature debut, but she went on to collaborate twice on short subjects with Ronald Searle, so I think she came out all right. This chance brought to you by my patriotic backers at Patreon.