But of course the drinks are dosed. The film is so relaxed even the fistfights seem polite and are abandoned as soon as someone takes a good hit. Adapted from a novel credited to actor George Sanders but actually written by genre doyenne and Howard Hawks script-mistress Leigh Brackett, The Unholy Four is actually a literate, witty and brooding tale, beginning when a man (William Sylvester, remembered best as Dr. Heywood Floyd, the scientist visiting the Moon, in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968) drives up to a manor house in the middle of the night, and approaches it as though it were a zoo cage full of sleeping lions. Bound by bitterness and suspicion, Phil Vickers is returning home from an unexplained four-year absence - unexplained least to Vickers himself. Fisher's film takes its sweet time in peeling the artichoke, as he reenters a posh landscape populated by a wife he considers faithless (Goddard), a pair of business partners (Patrick Holt and Paul Carpenter) with whom he was vacationing in Portugal when he was assaulted and suffered amnesia, his wife's vengeance-seeking and potentially gay social secretary (Alvys Maben), and a frivolous demimonde of hangers-about and devious postwar partiers, who gather virtually every night at various mansions, and at which drunken get-togethers, it is implied, marriages collapse and people sometimes die.
Vickers' primary suspect, one Harry, a fourth corner of the men's uneasy quad, becomes one of these corpses before we even meet him, and the police up the tension all around, tracking Vickers as he himself rather testily investigates everyone else as to what had happened in Portugal. No one seems broken up about Harry, but then nobody gets too worked up over much in The Unholy Four (an alternate title, The Stranger Came Home, makes a good deal more sense), and its clamped-pot-lid personality is one of its most beguiling features, beginning with Sylvester's snake-eyed, contemptuous coolness. "I don't like people very much," says another, far more sociable type early on, in a classically Brackettian bit of dialogue, "not even the people I like." Nobody's to be trusted, clearly, but even in this snake pit, it's not hard to believe everybody when they inform the police more than once that Vickers was and is almost universally loathed. Walking around like an imperious ghost, putting every other character on the defensive, Vickers seems volatile and dangerous thanks only to his stillness. What happened to you in Portugal?, his ostensible friends ask. "You were there," he replies. "You tell me."
Fisher was already one of the most reliable and prolific journeymen in British B pictures, and though he became Hammer's top-line ace after the horror films hit big, his style was always predicated on efficiency and simplicity. (You can't make five films a year, as Fisher commonly did in the '50s, and be an innovative craftsman, too.) Here, his job consisted mostly of letting Sylvester's seething boil chill every scene, and letting the cast have quiet fun with Brackett's dialogue (courtesy of the screenplay by Hammer producer Michael Carreras, who was not noted for his writing). Lines are just tossed away, in a prototypically British manner - when evidence mounts in Vickers' favor, Russell Napier's hawk-nosed inspector just mutters, "I had such a beautiful case against you." The story itself becomes tangled in false confessions, fatal accidents, and mysterious motivations - we never do learn what "firm" the four men were in control of, or how its finances figured into the plot - and before long the list of corpses gets long enough to make everyone, even Vickers, sweat. Sometimes, a brittle, calm, terribly British approach to melodrama can be a tonic - just what one needs after a steady diet of American hyperbole and make-'em-feel-it moviemaking. Compared to a contemporaneous American noir, The Unholy Four capitalizes on that British sense of crime unfurling amongst the privileged, and at home - and it also resonates with a concern for personal and marital relationships, and how they can be poisoned by duplicity and secrecy. In the States, noir usually means greed and fate have caught up with you. In England, you could only be betrayed by those whom you loved and thought loved you.
By Michael Atkinson
