The Green Man (Blu-ray)

An irreverent black comedy adapted by Frank Launder (The Lady Vanishes) and Sidney Gilliat (Night Train to Munich) from their play Meet a Body, The Green Man marked the directorial debut of camera operator Robert Day (Tarzan the Magnificent). A scintillating Alastair Sim (An Inspector Calls) plays Hawkins, a timid watchmaker with a part-time job—he is also a professional assassin who bumps off the people we love to hate. But when pompous MP Sir Gregory Upshott (Raymond Huntley, So Evil My Love) is the intended target, bungling vacuum cleaner salesman William Blake (George Cole, Cleopatra) always gets in the way. As the time of the assassination draws even closer and Hawkins tracks his victim to a dilapidated seaside hotel called The Green Man, the laughs and the tension steadily rise to a brilliant climax. A perfect companion piece to Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers, The Green Man is an enormously entertaining farce that dutifully ticks all the genre’s expected boxes (mistaken identities, compromising positions, much panicking and slamming of doors). Co-starring comedy legend Terry-Thomas (Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies).