Hammer the Toff

John Bentley is the Toff, an aristocratic private eye -- he goes by "the Honorable Richard Rollinson" who encounter Patricia Dainton at a fancy hotel. She has just received a greeting card from her late uncle. Meanwhile, a criminal who is called the Hammer wants her uncle's formula for a metal; it's the usual scientific bafflegab used by writers in search of a Maguffin. The police are tracking down the Hammer, because he has just committed a murder. Previously he had used the same hammer for smash and grab jobs, which he then distributed among the poor of London's East End.

It's based on one of more than five hundred novels by John Creasey, and the director is quota quicky specialist Maclean Rogers. Shot at Nettleford Studio -- I noticed several sets from the Alastair Sim SCROOGE -- it's an efficiently directed second feature that tries to play off Bentley's and Miss Dainton's appearances in the "Temple Drake" mysteries.

It's a far more nuanced view of the police and their relationship with ordinary people than one usually gets from the movies. Certainly the people of the East End in this movie don't look on the coppers as their friends. Other than that, it's another of the approximately ten thousand mysteries the movies offered their audiences; and a fairly run mystery at that.