Tiger in the Smoke

London fog has never been so abundant in noir. In Roy Ward Baker’s Tiger in the Smoke, the tale of a war widow whose husband may or may not have come back from the dead, fog is practically the main character, and its “performance” steals the show. Having been sent a mysterious picture of her husband, Meg Elgin (Muriel Pavlow) arranges a meeting with the sender but instead encounters an out-of-work actor wearing her husband’s old jacket. When the actor soon turns up stabbed to death and then Meg’s fiancé Geoffrey Leavitt (Donald Sinden) is kidnapped, assistant police commissioner Oates (Alec Clunes) and church Canon Avril (Laurence Naismith) get involved to help solve the puzzle, which will turn out to involve a gang of penniless street musicians who congregate in a dank cellar, a psychopathic escaped convict named Johnnie Cash (Tony Wright), and a dubious lost treasure in France (“It’s heavenly”). The filmmakers create a nocturnal London full of chaos, characters swimming through fog, the band members carrying drums and wheeling a muzzled hostage through a psychedelic dystopia, Unsworth’s camera bobbing and weaving and tilting to magnify the freneticism. Some might find the script slightly overcomplicated, but the visual thrills are nonstop (an intruder chases Meg through a darkened house with a knife, a man dangles from a rock ledge, someone is murdered in a church), and the noir style is painted on thick.