The Third Key

I've been getting recommendations for obscure British films from Amazon ever since I bought either Green for Danger or Laughter in Paradise. Anyhow, one that I bought a few months back because it sounded interesting was The Third Key.

Now the first thing you need to know is that The Third Key is the American title. That's what appears on the DVD cover art, which I can assure you is not as blurry as the photo I took with my cell phone. The original British title, and what appears in the opening credits of the print on the DVD, is The Long Arm. Also, the plot summary I read on Amazon made it sound like a "locked-room" mystery, which is not quite what it is. It's more of a police procedural than anything else.

The action opens with an industrial office of some sort after work hours. Cut to a shot of the safe, and somebody in gloved hands has the key to the safe, which he uses to open the safe and take out the money. And he would have gotten away with it if the alarm hadn't go off, bringing the police. But the guy is smart enough to pass himself off as the night watchman.

Anyhow, it turns out that the police have a seris of unsolved safecrackings on their hands, and Scotland Yard Detective Superintendent Halliday (Jack Hawkins) is just the man to investigate it. At first, Halliday has no idea where to begin, much to the chagrin of his wife Mary (Dorothy Alison). She'd rather he be at home nights looking after her and their son. But duty calls, and Halliday investigates along with much junior partner Ward (John Stratton), who only has a girlfriend and isn't used to the police life of having to abandon her at the drop of a hat to go to work on a case.

Finally, they get a bit of a break in that somebody is able to put two and two together and determine that all of the cracked safes were made by the same company. It seems logical that somebody who worked at the company was surreptitiously making a spare key for each of the safes, and then using that key to break in. But who and how did he do it without getting caught? More distressingly is that the investigation reveals that everybody who could have made the keys has a good alibi except for one. And the only reason that person wasn't able to supply the police with an alibi is that that person is dead, having gone missing at sea a few years back.

Still, they have to operate on the assumption that perhaps the guy only went missing at sea but survived, since his body was never actually found. Time to find his widow and investigate further.

The Third Key is actually pretty good for a police procedural, even if there's no new ground being broken here. The crime story ultimately fits together reasonably well, which is something reasonably important for a movie in the genre. The movie also benefits from the location shooting of London as it was in the mid-1950s.

The DVD itself is bare bones, with no features whatsoever, and my Blu-ray player not even showing a proper chapter menu. But for an obscure movie like this, it's nice that the movie is even available, and at a moderate price. The Third Key is a movie I can strongly recommend.