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Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Very Cool!!!

Pretty Good

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

I like the idea of David Somers being fired from his job and forced to register with an employment agency to secure a new job cataloguing butterflies. It shows how a career person can fall from grace and end up following the agency route. What makes this stand out is that even though Somers has friends he can speak to about his unemployment, even his friend, Kenneth More, is spying on him and reporting back to HQ. It shows that you can't trust anyone because whoever you speak to will either block your pathway, or speak to people who can block your pathway. The fact that Somers ends up in a dull job is just a macguffin because it puts him in contact with Jean Simmons whom he goes on the run with because she is accused of a murder.

It's more than possible than David Cornwell saw this film and kept the idea of a British secret agent getting fired and then taking a dead-end job in mind when he came to write The Spy Who Came In From The Cold a good decade later. Naturally it's not quite straightforward plagiarism, for one thing Trevor Howard really is fired whereas Richard Burton was only pretending; against that both ex-spies take similar jobs, Howard in a private house and Burton in a left-wing private library. That's still not as referential as the Clouded Yellow gets because next comes the one about Sonia Dresdel trying to send Jean Simmons mad - straight out of Gaslight and, for good measure, we get a touch of the 39 Steps as Howard and Simmons take it on the Jesse Owens with the Lake District standing in for Scotland. None of this would matter if there was even a spark of chemistry between Howard and Simmons, alas, a romance between Stalin and Mother Teresa would be more convincing. On the other hand nostalgia buffs will have a field day spotting the likes of Richard Pearson, Sam Kydd, Richard Wattis, Dandy Nichols, Geoffrey Keen and more all fretting and strutting their hour upon the stage. Poor Butterfly indeed.

If it weren't for good old Trevor Howard, this film would not be nearly so interesting. He is always enjoyable to watch, as he is always convincing and we want to see what he will get up to. Here he is thrown out of MI-6, the foreign secret service, rather unceremoniously after years of brilliant service in the field, and has to find some work. He ends up taking a temporary job cataloguing butterflies, of which the Clouded Yellow is a particularly pretty one which comes across the English Channel in a good summer and flutters around as delightfully as Jean Simmons. And yes, she is living in the rambling country house where the butterfly collection is. She is the psychologically disturbed and mysteriously orphaned niece of a rather creepy aunt and uncle. Or at least they say, rather too often, that Jean is psychologically disturbed. But is she really? Did she witness as a very young child what really happened to her parents? They say she 'found them'. But did she see who killed them? Clearly there is some vintage mystery material here. Jean Simmons at this stage in her career had very bushy eyebrows and looked more like a trapped wild animal than a girl. Alas, she did not have the magically convincing wildness of Jennifer Jones in GONE TO EARTH (1950, see my review), or this film could have become something of a classic. The direction by Ralph Thomas is also rather uninspired and pedestrian. So this film never really rises to the level of a butterfly's flight. Come to that, the story is pretty contrived and corny. The film is a tasty amuse-bouche, but should never be confused with a main course.

I rated this film only 6/10 which agrees with the overall IMDb.com average rating.As other reviewers have aptly pointed out above, this Ralph Thomas directed film does not have the quirky comedy, pace or nail biting finish of a Hitchcock.However It has some similarities enough to show Thomas was at least influenced by that great master.Jean Simmons was 22 when she made this film and was at a stage in her career when agents were casting her in roles where she had psychiatric problems.One only has to think of her "Ophelia" in Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet" (1948) and "Angel Face" (1952), the psychotic daughter of Herbert Marshall.Much as I admire Trevor Howard I do not see him as a romantic lead (unless he is wooing Celia Johnson. i.e. an older woman); so I would have preferred a younger looking and more handsome leading man.The final scene (as pointed out above by another reviewer) showed them walking along the rooftops of the Liverpudlian warehouse, arm in arm but it looked more like father and daughter!! (Note: I know Trevor Howard always looked older than he really was).I guess he obtained this cloak & dagger type part on the strength of his army officer cracking down on black market traffickers in Carol Reed's "The Third Man" (1949). Barry Jones often appeared in professorial type roles and he made a menacing "baddy".I love spotting character actors in films of this vintage such as Sam Kydd as a police wireless operator and the actor Richard Wattis who played the employment consultant (the same year he played the maths master in "The Happiest Days of Your Life" with Alistair Sim).Also I spotted Dandy Nichols as a harassed mother on the train, long before she would rise into public awareness as Mrs Garnett in the 60s TV comedy series " 'Till Death Do Us Part" with Warren Mitchell.Kenneth More was really serving his film acting apprenticeship and before long he would play a lead in "Genevieve" (1953).Have a look at Hitchcock's "The 39 Steps" (1935) with Robert Donat & Madeleine Carroll and particularly compare the chase scenes over the wild countryside, then compare the pacing, humour and interplay between the principal actors and you will see why this film ,although good, only warrants a 6/10.