London fog and rushing trains create an ominous atmosphere in Ray Ward Baker’s
The October Man, a beautifully shot British crime film that captures the American noir ethos and aesthetic better than most of its peers. After spending months in the hospital recovering from brain damage caused by a bus accident, Jim Ackland (John Mills) is released into the fog of night. Renting a room in a small inn populated by mostly elderly residents, Jim meets his lovely, young neighbor Molly Newman (Kay Walsh) who asks to borrow money for an urgent need. When Molly ends up murdered in the park the next day, Jim soon becomes a suspect not only to the police, but to himself: what if his mind hasn’t fully recovered? The B&W cinematography makes beautiful use of nighttime, fog, and trains rushing by; one lovely scene has Jim contemplating suicide on a footbridge as a train roars underneath, exactly as Audrey Totter would do two years later in Robert Wise’s
The Set-Up (1949).
