Murder on Monday

One of my recent DVD purchases was the barebones Reel Vault release of the British movie Home at Seven, and not long ago I sat down to watch it.

Ralph Richardson plays David Preston, who works at a bank in London and lives in one of the suburbs, arriving home at 7:00 PM every evening. One day he comes home to find that his wife Janet (Margaret Leighton) is frantic. David doesn't understand why, insisting that today is a day just like any other, in which he did his exact same routine. But it turns out that something happened. David comes home with Monday's newspaper, while Janet shows him Tuesday's. Obviously David spent 24 hours somewhere, but where?

The first thing to try to do is to get David's memory back, to which end his physician, Dr. Sparling (Jack Hawkins) is brought in. But there's only so much that David remembers before everything gets hazy. One possible clue is that there's no dirt or anything on David's suit and overcoat to suggest that he was outside for a long period of time, but that's nowhere near enough. The police have been called in.

The police are about to make life rather difficult for David, too. David is one of the officers at a gentlemen's club (not the euphemistic kind) along with his neighbor, Major Watson (Michael Shepley). Watson stops by to ask David what happened last night, to which David has to try to come up with an excuse despite not remembering anything. And David better have a good excuse: another officer with access to the club safe has been found murdered, with over £500 missing!

David also hasn't been helping himself by telling some little white lies. One he's been telling his wife for years because he doesn't want to alarm her, while another one about where he was last night is to try to keep any controversy from falling on the couple, what with the probity bankers are supposed to have. Of course, once David tells one of those lies to the police, you can expect that things are going to get rather worse for him.

Ralph Richardson directed, and did a quite good job making a really engaging little movie. There's not a lot of action as most of what happens is confined to a couple of sets, but the intelligent script and good acting make for what is an excellent programmer. Home at Seven is a movie that deserves to be much better known.