POSTMARK FOR DANGER aka PORTRAIT OF ALISON (1955)

By Gary Deane

For some, there’s the country in which they were born, and then there’s the country in which they wish they’d been born.

British director Guy Green's country of choice was the United States – to the extent that it would not be England, but California, where he'd reside for forty years prior to his death in 2005. However, long before coming to the US, Green had made clear his affinity for both American actors and the more expansive Hollywood film style. 

Green began his film career as a cameraman, then director of cinematography who'd work on such classic British titles as The Way Ahead (1944), The Way to the Stars (1945), Oliver Twist (1948), and The Passionate Friends (1949). In 1947, he received an Academy Award for his filming of David Lean’s Great Expectations made the previous year.

Green's first assignment as a director was River Beat (1954), an involving crime thriller with American actress Phyllis Kirk embroiled in the investigation of a smuggling racket. He followed with several solid British B-noirs, including Tears for Simon (1956), Postmark for Danger (1956), Triple Deception (1958), The Snorkel (1959), S.O.S. Pacific (1960), and The Angry Silence (1961), all featuring US-born or naturalized actors. Among them was Stuart Whitman, who'd win an Academy Award nomination for The Mark (1962).

While still in England, Green helmed several large-scale American productions for MGM, including Light in the Piazza (1962) and Diamond Head (1965).  He then moved to the US to direct his best known film as a director, the interracial love story, A Patch of Blue (1967), which garnered a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Shelley Winters, plus four other nominations.   

More interesting to film noir audiences, however, is Green’s Postmark for Danger (aka Portrait of Alison, its British release title). Based on a novel by Francis Durbridge, creator of the Paul Temple series, Postmark is a tense Hitchcockian tale featuring double-crosses, a mistake in identity, and a comely female in trouble who’s rescued by a reluctant hero. It also comes with a McGuffin.  

Portrait artist Tim Forrester (Robert Beatty) learns from his brother Dave (William Sylvester), a charter pilot, that their younger brother Lewis, along with an American actress, Alison Ford (Terry Moore), has been killed in a car accident in Italy.  Both the Italian police and Scotland Yard, however, believe that Lewis, an investigative journalist, was murdered as a result of a story he was doing about an international diamond smuggling operation.  

The police are interested in a postcard that Lewis may have sent to Tim which might contain clues to the mystery. However, they become more involved when a) Tim's favorite model (Josephine Griffin) turns up dead in his apartment and b) he claims that Alison is alive and that she suspects her father to be part of the smuggling ring. Tim was once sought out by Alison’s father who had commissioned a painting of her. It was completed working from a photo in which she appears to be wearing the same dress as found on the dead model.

With distant echoes of Laura, Postmark for Danger unfurls in a tantalizing mist of eerie and unlikely coincidences, before settling in as a fraught police procedural based on a script by Ken Hughes. Green’s high-impact direction and the emphatic lensing of cinematographer Wilkie Cooper give Postmark for Danger its luminous look and feel, free of the kinds of restraints, both visual and dramatic, that can hobble British B noirs. It's also good to see fist fights that are staged and not choreographed. Postmark for Danger remains one of Guy Green’s most resilient films. 

However, after his moment in the Los Angeles sun with A Patch of Blue, Green went on the squander his reputation with The Magus, one of the most critically vilified films of all time. Green never recovered, becoming involved in other ill-considered projects such as Jacqueline Susann’s Once is Not Enough and a host of so-so made-for-television movies. Nevertheless, in 2004, the director was awarded the Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth for his lifetime contributions and services to cinema. He would die the following year.