The Weapon

Noir fans should watch Val Guest’s The Weapon for the gorgeous noir visuals and action sequences among London’s sprawling war ruins, wet and lamplit streets, and abandoned buildings, almost entirely at night. On the other hand, viewers are advised to suspend their instinct to analyze events logically since plot holes (or, at least, unclear motivations) are abundant. While playing with his neighborhood pals in the ruins (a symbolic manifestation of postwar trauma found in so many European noirs), a young boy named Erik Jenner (Jon Whiteley) finds a loaded handgun and accidentally shoots another boy, presumably dead, and flees; with police immediately descending on his residence, Erik wanders the city streets, cold and hungry, terrified to go home and face his punishment. Not only are Scotland Yard, led by Superintendent Mackenzie (Herbert Marshall), on his tail, but so is U.S. Army Major Mark Andrews (Steve Cochran), as it seems the gun has been identified as the weapon used to murder his friend ten years earlier. Looking beautiful in one of her final film roles, Lizabeth Scott plays Erik’s American mother Elsa (his English father is dead), and George Cole plays the creepy Joshua Henry, who suddenly befriends Elsa because he too wants the gun. In perhaps the film’s most engaging performance, Nicole Maurey plays prostitute Vivienne with her nihilistic worldview (“I’m dead, but I won’t fall down”) and unfortunate connection to Henry, leading to no good. For a relatively small film with a mere 77-minute runtime, Guest packs it full of not just visual atmospherics but a surprising volume of action, including car crashes, dramatic leaps out windows, sniper fire in the back, and fistfights galore.