Wanted for Murder

“Help me,” says Victor James Colebrooke (Eric Portman) when he proposes marriage to Anne Fielding (Dulcie Gray) as a final, desperate plea moments before the police arrest him for a string of murders in Lawrence Huntington’s Wanted for Murder. An unexpectedly sympathetic serial killer, Colebrooke inherited the desire to kill from his executioner grandfather (“Why do you haunt me? Why can’t you leave me in peace?”) and he seems to feel it most intensely when he’s attracted to a woman. With the encouragement of his mother (Barbara Everest), who’s unaware of Victor’s demons, Victor occasionally goes on dates which occasionally produce corpses, such as that of Jeannie McLaren (Jenny Laird), whom Victor takes to the woods and holds in his arms as she sings a tune to the moonlight (“Oh, look, the cloud’s just beginning to cover the moon”), her life snuffed out just a moment later. His relationship with Anne, however, is altogether different as he hopes she might be the one to fix him; in the final scene when he rows Anne to a small island in a lake off Hyde Park, comparisons to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) are inevitable (including the possibly homosexual subtext). While budget limitations required extensive — and occasionally comical — use of rear projection, Wanted for Murder is a satisfying British noir that brings a psychological dimension lacking in most crime pictures of the period.