Crown v. Stevens

CinemaSerfSep 2022

3.0

This is quite a decent little pot boiler that sees "Doris" (Beatrix Stevens) married to her wealthy, but thrifty husband "Alf" (Reginald Purdell). Now to put it mildly, she is pretty beastly to him and as she finally tires of his reluctance to waste his money on her, she conceives of a plan to get shot of him and claim his substantial life insurance - and she manages to embroil his rather naive, but equally cash-strapped, employee "Jensen" (Patric Knowles) in her plotting too. The title is a touch misleading; this isn't remotely a court-room drama. It is, though, quite a niftily paced drama about a greedy woman with a distinctly dodgy moral compass who ultimately comes a cropper in rather underwhelming fashion. There is no real jeopardy to the simple plot, indeed the whole thing is pretty much join-the-dots cinema, but you can see here that Knowles has a little je ne sais quoi about him. Although the production is distinctly basic, it still passes an hour effortlessly enough.