With a propulsive story involving a mysterious woman, a kidnapping, a counterfeiting syndicate, code cracking, and more than one chase through the city, John Gilling’s Tiger by the Tail (US: Cross-Up) is a sadly overlooked (and difficult to find) British noir that adds a spirit of adventure to a solid crime film. Transferred to his news outlet’s London bureau, American journalist John Desmond (Larry Parks, who had been blacklisted in the US) soon begins a fling with beautiful, mysterious Anna Ray (Lisa Daniely) who keeps him in the dark about her line of work until the night he accidentally shoots her dead. Desperate to hide his crime from police authorities, Desmond confides only in his attractive, reliable secretary Jane Claymore (Constance Smith) who has developed affection for him, but soon he’s kidnapped and held hostage in a mansion outside of town belonging to Anna’s associates in a counterfeiting ring who believe Desmond possesses Anna’s book of encoded contacts, which, Desmond later discovers, can be interpreted by cross-referencing with the Latin writing of Virgil’s Aeneid. Played by Cyril Chamberlain and Alexander Gauge, Desmond’s outwardly polite captors torture the journalist, but when he still doesn’t hand over the book, they begin to suspect he may be a U.S. Treasury agent, which makes him far more dispensable. The camera work of Eric Cross is inventive but not overwhelmingly so, increasingly employing Dutch angles and long shadows as Desmond becomes more angry, more disoriented, and hobbled by forced injections.