“I decided to take a bungalow on Lake Windemere,” says the voiceover of American novelist Mark Kendrick (Alex Nicol) in Ken Hughes’ The House Across the Lake (US: Heat Wave) as he recalls how his initial encounter with the beautiful Carol Forrest (Hillary Brooke) led to his downfall, a narrative premise that by this point in the cycle had become practically a parody of itself. One night, while procrastinating by his typewriter, Kendrick receives an unexpected phone call from a woman “across the lake” who, having noticed his boat, asks the writer to transport a few party guests to the formal affair she’s hosting. Kendrick obliges, but from the moment he sees Carol’s ghost-like image awaiting the passengers on her dock in the distance, we know we’re heading for trouble. Accepting her invitation to stay for the party, Kendrick learns that Carol has recently married an older man she doesn’t love, Beverly Forrest (Sid James), whose daughter Andrea (Susan Stephen) clearly despises Carol for flaunting her extramarital affairs right in front of her father’s face. Speaking of affairs, Kendrick will be next: and once Carol ensnares him, the husband suddenly becomes a lot more disposable. It’s a storyline done dozens of times, most famously in the film adaptations of James M. Cain’s novels, Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and while this comparatively sleepy film is a minor footnote in the noir cycle, the Hammer studio touch and Hughes’ confident direction (based on his own script) make for a perfectly entertaining also-ran.