The Limping Man

Back in the 1950s, it wasn't uncommon for British studios to bring over a second-tier Hollywood actor and give them the lead in a movie in order to make it easier for the studio to get somebody back in the US to pick the movie up for distribution. Recently, I watched another such movie off of the Mill Creek box set I've mentioned a couple of times in the past. That film is The Limping Man.

The American star in question is Lloyd Bridges. He plays Franklyn Pryor, who served in the US Army back in the War and now, several years later, is flying back to Londo to meet the woman he had a relationship with back then, Pauline French (Moira Lister), in the hopes that he can rekindle that relationship. This was the era when flying was in some ways more glamorous, but in other ways just simpler, such as all the passengers walking across the tarmac to get to the terminal. Franklyn was sitting next to one Kendall Brown on the plane, and as they're walking across the tarmac, a sniper shoots Kendall dead!

Oh dear, poor Franklyn is going to have to delay his meeting with Pauline since he's going to have to deal with the police, being a witness to the crime after all. They'll want to know his whereabouts and whatnot if they need more information from him. And, unsurprisingly, they think he might know more than he's letting on.

Eventually he's able to get in touch with Pauline, and he finds that all is not going as well as he might have thought, which should be expected since the war ended quite some time back. The bigger problem is the way in which things aren't going well. Pauline, it turns out, started a relationship with Kendall what with Franklyn benig back in America, and that will give the police more reason to suspect either Pauline or Franklyn in the killing of Kendall.

There's also a motive, in that somebody was blackmailing Pauline since she and Kendall were involved in shady business of getting around the rationing that was still going on in the UK until the early 1950s, by using Pauline's boat to stock up on cargo from across the Channel in order to resell it.

Fortunately, however, the police have evidence that suggest the killer might have walked with a limp. But then, there are a whole bunch of characters who seem to have a lime, or could just be faking it to try to throw the police off the trail of the killer, much like wearing a bad wig.

The plot could take The Limping Man in any number of directions, but the way in which it ultimately does take it is something that I won't mention other then to say there's a reason everybody on IMDb who reviews the movie mentions the ending even if they don't spoil exactly what it is. The Limping Man is an interesting enough premise, competently acted, until that ending.

The print on the Mill Creek DVD is understandably not particularly great, considering how much you're paying for it, but I wonder how good any of the prints are since this was not a prestige movie and not from a big British studio. So take what you can get, enjoy the first 80 or so minutes, and forget that the ending the studio has is the one that they do.