Time Without Pity

Based on a play by Emlyn Williams, Joseph Losey’s Time Without Pity boasts one of the most brilliantly intense opening scenes in all of noir, and the rest of the film will live up to that promise only depending on your taste. It’s an unusually plotted whodunit which simmers through drunken escapades and hysterical meltdowns until boiling over in the final half-hour, all against a backdrop of British mid-1950’s propriety. Some may find the script slightly unsatisfying, especially since viewers learn who done it even before the opening credits, while others will consider it a tour de force in layered, character-driven storytelling. Michael Redgrave plays alcoholic David Graham, who arrives in London in a seemingly futile effort to save his son Alec (Alec McCowen) from state execution for murdering his girlfriend. With mere hours to spare, David makes it his mission to find something — anything — that might cast doubt on Alec’s death sentence (“What they want and you’ll never get is something tangible,” the murderer informs him mockingly); his investigation, half of which is conducted in a drunken haze, has him interrogating feisty showgirls, beautiful secretaries, and, most importantly, Alec’s closest friend Brian Stanford (Paul Daneman) and his parents, brash industrialist Robert (Leo McKern) and his somewhat mysterious wife Honor (Ann Todd). The camera is helmed by Freddie Francis, who would go on to direct a couple of very late noirs from Hammer (Paranoiac, 1963; Nightmare, 1964), while the remarkable score by Tristram Cary injects screeching tension and dissonance that unsettles the viewer from the first note.