Watch The Rossiter Case For Free
The Rossiter Case
The happy marriage of Liz and Peter Rossiter is shattered after Liz is paralysed in an accident. Peter soon finds solace with Honor, his sister-in-law, but when she tells him she is expecting his child he is racked with guilt and turns to drink. When Honor is found murdered with Peter's gun next to her, the police arrest him. Unable to remember his movements he must discover the secret behind "The Rossiter Case".
| Release : | 1951 |
| Rating : | 5.9 |
| Studio : | Hammer Film Productions, |
| Crew : | Director of Photography, Director, |
| Cast : | Helen Shingler Sheila Burrell Frederick Leister Henry Edwards Ewen Solon |
| Genre : | Drama Mystery |
Watch Trailer
Cast List
Reviews
Too much of everything
Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike
The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
Maybe the music director decided that the dreadfully slow drama needed beefing up.So he thought it could do with a touch of the Max Steiners.So every dramatic moment is overlaid by screeching violins which at times render the dialogue inaudible. This film only warms up in the last 15 minutes.This despite the fact that the writers and director were very experienced in making this sort of film.
Well-made if somewhat slow-paced British melodrama involving an aristocrat cheating on his paralyzed wife with her sister. Sheila Burrell's portrayal of the husband-stealing sister is powerfully disturbing even negatively impacting her physical appearance as her character unfolds throughout the movie. The condoning of the overt affair by family and friends is remarkably insensitive to its impact on the paralyzed woman, Liz Rossiter. Helen Shingler's Liz Rossiter is selfless without becoming pitiful. This is a good movie that requires patience due to the snails-pacing.
The only point of interest in this way too talky film was seeing a young Stanley Baker as a glorified extra cast as Joe who is entrusted with one line of dialogue by the producers and yet he became the more famous of the cast.Other reviewers have given the basic premise of this 1950 film which could have been edited to one half its length.I will not repeat the sparse plot and I only rated it 6/10.The only actor familiar to me was seeing Euen Solon as the police inspector.I agree with another user's review, it should not have been filmed but consigned to the radio at a time when most of the population went to the cinema to see their heroes and heroines of the silver screen and listened to the radio.
The plot of the film largely has to do with the love triangle between a married man, his wife, who was paralyzed in a car crash and her sister who is having an affair with the husband. The sister wants the husband to leave his wife, but he won't and it causes all sorts of problems...Actually it leads to murder in the final 15 or 20 minutes of the film. There is no mystery as to who does it, the real question is will they be found out and what will the ramifications be.A way too talky film substitutes talk for action. Nothing much really happens other than emotions simmer under the surface which would be all fine and good except that the film is largely static as a result with people just sitting and standing around talking with no sense of motion (this would have been a heck of a radio play. By the time the murder happens you really won't care, especially after the denouncement at the end What were they thinking?
