Watch Wanted for Murder For Free

To me, this movie is perfection.

Good concept, poorly executed.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The most interesting aspect of this lacklustre thriller are the views that it gives us of post war austerity London.This is a thriller without a thrill.For some bizarre reason we know the killer from the beginning.The reason for his murderous impulses arise from the fact that his grandfather was the public hangman in Victorian Times.To add to the character he is also a hummus boy.The actors do their best with the material but some of them are miscast.In particular Dulcie Grey and Derick Farr.I cannot remember a bus conductor talking as if he was fresh from a Mayfair nightclub.I can only assume that this film has such a high,overrated mark,due to the prescience of Portman and writing of Pressburger.

I love the fact that there is a wealth of unseen movies out there to discover, sometimes you unearth diamonds, sometimes you just find rubbish. Wanted for Murder is a worthy discovery, it begins very slowly, but opens up nicely, the real mystery being which planets some of the accents hail from, this era loved the terribly proper English accent, and the extreme working class alternative. I find the camera work ad filming very appealing, it somehow feels quite crisply put together,quite slick. Accents apart, it's very well acted, Eric Pittman is fantastic, brilliantly menacing, a huge on screen presence.. Roland Culver and Stanley Holloway are excellent, a great double act, with Holloway injecting a dash of humour. Some great cameos, Wilfred Hyde White and the lady purchasing a record, great fun. The audiences of the forties had a definite taste for mystery, and thank goodness for it. A gem, 8/10.

The title pretty much says it all. Eric Portman is wanted for murder in this tedious, unsuspenseful melodrama--most of which is set in very un-noirish sunshine.What makes this especially hard to endure are the endless scenes of the police inspectors trying to anticipate (and then catch up) with Portman, as they waddle around the station, answering the phone and drinking tea. These scenes which are risible, (and no favor to Scotland Yard) are so padded, that one feels the director felt he needed them to increase the running time. Did he also feel that making the police the perfect model of incompetence would aid the story? The climax set on a lake with the police in hot pursuit is "Saturday Night Live" material.And the story ain't much--Portland is the middle aged Mamma's boy, who keeps a clipping file of his previous slayings, (a plot device borrowed from the far superior, "They Drive By Night" (1938) starring Ernest Thesiger).As for the acting, well who can top Barbara Everest as Portman's mother, who evidently believes she has been cast in a Victorian melodrama of the "East Lynne" school--so many hand claspings and heaven-ward glances does she employ.Don't be mis-led into buying this sight unseen thinking it's one of those great, esoteric, unknown British noirs. It isn't! Moreover, apart from a carnival sequence the whole thing is staged very unimaginatively.

It's all very nicely done. I had barely, if ever, heard of any of the leads in this movie before I saw it. I was expecting a sloppy film noir set in London, but it was a pleasant surprise when the dialogue and the players were as good as they are. The story is tight, mostly, and there is real tension and unexpected humor. Overall, it was very effective.I was particularly impressed with Eric Portman as Colebrooke. There was not much of a tradition playing sociopaths at this point in the movies. Of the few that had been portrayed, Cagney in "White Heat", for example, is much more histrionic and obvious than Portman is here.I might quibble with some plot points and some really heavy-handed staging, but really this is much like middle Hitchcock without all of the psychological mumbo-jumbo to push it along.