High Treason

What I found while wading through dozens of noirs and would-be noirs from the late 40s to mid-50s is how difficult it is to get a film equally appealing to man and woman.

With men, it's derring-do, chases, frenetic action, suspense ... and with women, it's treason, betrayal, human interest, paranoia and so on. Love interest. In this era, too often women were seen as 2D and men also as 2D in a gung-ho way, spiffing, chaps. There were class movies which had a better mix but they're all buy or rent.

This one is presented by one Hannah Clulow and has over a million views.  Promising.

I do look for the ladies' reviews if possible and this by Susan Pound is weird:

I love British Films. Their actors don't have to be handsome or a size 4, all they have to do is be good actors and actresses.

People then go into this size 4 biz - even in American sizes, no man is that.  Then this one, by Sarah Colosso:

This is the first review I have ever written - and perhaps the most irrelevant you will ever read, however I was wondering if anyone else noticed the sheer number of footsteps the listener hears throughout this film? Really, not a review at all, but I beg you, the reader, to humor me on this, my first time out! **sarah**

Sigh.  So often this anxiety in a lass, as if she's going to be harshly judged. Anyway, to one of the amateur reviews, uncorrected:

The centre of the film is a shabby little electrical components and radio shop, owned by Joan Hickson, and staffed by her two sons. From their shabby kitchen, with its Edwardian bamboo whatnots and family photos, son Kenneth Griffith gets involved with a gang of high-minded communists who use an avant-garde music society as a front. (Who wrote the musical samples?)

The war is over, and there are new enemies - never named. And new allies, in the person of Commander Brennan, a very obvious Irishman from south of the border. Griffith becomes increasingly nervous as the "music-lovers" harrass him, a former contact is stabbed, and he realises he's had a part in an attack on the docks in which several men died, including a friend.

Yes, it's Hitchcockian, with the gleaming halls of the House of Commons featuring instead of Westminster Cathedral, as poor Griffith confesses all to quite the wrong man. He ends up imprisoned at the top of a tutorial college - another front organisation, guarded by a lackadaisical intellectual who's manning the hidden radio. In another scene this bespectacled swot insists on calling enemies of the movement "bourgeois deviationists".

It is truly suspenseful, and Joan Hickson gives an affecting performanc in a far larger role than her usual cameo. Dora Bryan pops in wearing outrageous hats and providing comic relief.

Also affording a few laughs are the "telephone repair men" sent by the security services to check out the college. "Can you hear me, mother?" was a catchphrase of the day.

Yes mother, we hear you.