Product Details

• Actors: Sally Gray, Trevor Howard, Rosamund John, Alastair Sim, Leo Genn
• Directors: Sidney Gilliat
• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Image Entertainment
• VHS Release Date: October 27, 1993
• Run Time: 90 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302789648
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #152,955 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Writer-director Sidney Gilliat isn't the household name he deserves to be, so his film Green for Danger--once an art-house perennial--qualifies as one of the major, and surely most delightful, (re)discoveries of the season. Its cunning blend of character-driven mystery, gothic dread, and inveterately English gallows humor makes for sheer movie-movie pleasure.

There's a perfect fusion of storytelling and moodmaking, plot and setting. The time is 1944, when Hitler was attacking the British populace with V-1 flying bombs. Under this ongoing siege, at an Elizabethan country manor made over as wartime hospital, someone among a half-dozen doctors and nurses is up to something sinister. Which one is anybody's guess, given the adroitly suggested crosscurrents of loathing and desire, suspicion and jealousy animating the company. After a mysterious death on the operating table, followed by a second death that's unmistakably murder, Scotland Yard enters the picture in the perversely antic form of that long drink of wormwood, the definitive Scrooge, Alastair Sim. (Actually, Sim's sepulchral voice deliciously narrates the film from the beginning.)

Gilliat, with his partner Frank Launder, had written Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (Hitch signed on after their exemplary screenplay was done) and its de facto sequel, Carol Reed's Night Train to Munich. The same talent for drollery without sacrificing tension is abundantly apparent in Green for Danger. As added inducements, the cast includes Trevor Howard and Leo Genn; the artfully shadowy cinematography is the work of Wilkie Cooper. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

101 of 105 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Star vehicle for a tragically forgotten star, November 30, 2001

By 

Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Green for Danger [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Alastair Sim is tragically remembered today for only one role: he was without any question the definitive Ebenezer Scrooge, and usually the only film that anyone today has seen featuring Sim is his 1951 turn in A CHRISTMAS CAROL. In fact, Sim starred in a wide range of comedic and dramatic roles in the 1940s and 1950s. He was a familiar enough presence that Alec Guinness paid homage to him by doing a straightforward imitation of Sim in the 1955 film THE LADYKILLERS, evening wearing false teeth to look more like Sim.

Sim managed to play in a large number of comedic suspense and mystery films. He starred in a series of Inspector Hornleigh films in the early forties, he went on to play memorable roles in wartime mysteries such as COTTAGE TO LET (with a very young John Mills in a key role), GREEN FOR DANGER, AN INSPECTOR CALLS (in which he plays a ghostly police inspector), and THE GREEN MAN, in which Sim plays a congenial assassin. But Sim also excelled in pure farce, and was magnificent in such films as THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF YOUR LIFE, LAUGHTER IN PARADISE, and the St. Trinian movies, which he played largely in drag. Sim, with his large frame, lugubrious eyes, and marvelously dramatic voice, was a delight in every film he graced, but today is primarily known for Scrooge, as noted above.

There is actually a very good historical reason for the demise of Sim's reputation and of British cinema in general. In the fifties and sixties, French auteur criticism came more and more to dominate European and American film criticism. One of the central assumptions of auteur critics has been that British cinema, with the almost exclusive exception of pre-Hollywood Hitchcock and the workd of Michael Powell and Eric Pressburger, has been an aesthetic wasteland. As an ardent fan of forties and fifties British cinema, I know that this is an utterly false representation of what was actually happening in England. There were a number of excellent directors and a large number of superb actors and actresses who somehow or other were not siphoned off by Hollywood.

GREEN FOR DANGER is one of Sim's finest films. The plot is largely superfluous. A postman dies in an operation in WW II England, under shady circumstances, and the great Inspector Cockrill is called in to solve the mystery. The movie is entirely a showcase for Sim's eccentric histrionics. The movie sinks or swims entirely on how one responds to Sim: if you love him (as I do), you will love this movie. If you dislike Sim (I reaction that would utterly mystify me), you will dislike this film.

I strongly urge all lovers of film comedy to search this film out. I especially recommend this to lovers of British cinema. I will add that I believe this to be the best film that Alastair Sim ever made, though I would hasten to add that he made a dozen others very nearly as good. They are large hard to find these days, but searching them out will definitely repay the effort.

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Go For The Green!, November 27, 2006

By 

Laura Ann Scaife "Laura Ann Scaife" (Vancouver, B.C. Canada) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Green for Danger (The Criterion Collection) (DVD)

I was absolutely thrilled to see that "Green For Danger" is finally being released on DVD. This is without a doubt one of the very best murder mysteries ever put onto film. Everything about this film, the acting, the writing, the direction, the photography - everything is world class. And Alastair Sim as Inspector Cockrill is the icing on the cake. If I had any complaint to make against this film it would be this - Why didn't this film lead to a whole series of Inspector Cockrill films? This is a wonderful piece of entertainment and I would urge any film fan not to miss it.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars thanks, Criterion, February 10, 2007

By 

D. Guenzel - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Green for Danger (The Criterion Collection) (DVD)

I've seen the Criterion dvd of GREEN FOR DANGER and all I can say is "thank you" to Criterion for the care they lavished on it. It is, without question, the finest video presentation ever seen of this brilliant film. After years of watching dark, grainy 16mm prints on TV (and dark, grainy vhs copies and laserdiscs) it is truly wonderful to see this top-flight dvd.

The film is, of course, the penultimate British murder mystery, the best that has ever been done. Let's face it: no movie that rates an entire chapter in a book ("The Detective Film" by Everson) can be dismissed lightly. Just get the disc and enjoy it. Those reviewers who recommended you curl up on a cold and windy night with a cup of warm liquid and watch it have given you sage advice.

At last GREEN FOR DANGER's gorgeous cinematography by Wilkie Cooper can be appreciated for the thing of beauty that it is. It is not for nothing that the American Society of Cinematographers included this picture in their list of the Best Photographed Films of the 1940s. Cooper's work is quite simply marvelous and is a textbook example of how to photograph a black and white film. This beautiful dvd transfer also enables us to appreciate the fine sets by Peter Proud, an art director of enormous talent and ingenuity.

Criterion also cleaned up the soundtrack to an amazing degree. I couldn't believe it at first when I heard it. The dialog is now razor sharp and William Alwyn's music...oh, my goodness is it a nice score!

Here is one that is a must for your library. Get it and enjoy it. And if you like it (and I cannot imagine that you wouldn't) go order another wonderful Launder-Gilliat film I SEE A DARK STRANGER. Again, thanks Criterion!