There’s a scene in Fergus McDonell’s The Small Voice (US: The Hideout) in which a hulking black train arrives at a station in a soup of fog, presenting a quintessentially film noir image that a viewer might want to savor by pressing pause. This atmosphere will be short-lived, however, since the majority of the film will take place inside the country cottage of playwright Murray Byrne (James Donald) and his actress wife Eleanor Byrne (Valerie Hobson), who has just announced she’s leaving Murray because his war injuries have made him too bitter. On the night before her departure, however, the couple pick up an injured man on the side of the road, unaware that he’s part of a gang of escaped convicts who, along with two children they’ve kidnapped from another car, take over the Murrays’ home at gunpoint. Despite his violent and caddish behavior toward the family and their tough-minded housekeeper Potter (Joan Young), handsome fugitive ringleader Boke (Howard Keel, whose virility seems to highlight Murray’s relative weakness) develops some form of conscience by the end, prompted by the screams of pain (the “small voice”) coming from the seven-year-old captive upstairs as he suffers in bed with meningitis. Visually, what’s most impressive about the film is cinematographer Stan Pavey’s creative camera angles (even under the covers with children) and use of deep focus, including remarkable shots with mirrors, to enlarge the domestic sets and refract the evolving personalities of the main characters.