I was your mind
2020-11-15 04:44I 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.
( And now I know I'm a coward, I don't need you. )
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.
( And now I know I'm a coward, I don't need you. )
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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}