The Third Visitor
Suave supercilious Carling (Karel Stepanek) receives several callers to his isolated house, all of whom hold a grudge against him. Next morning a corpse is found, and later identified as his by one of the visitors.
CinemaSerf@Geronimo1967
This is quite a cleverly constructed little thriller from Maurice Elvey. We start by watching Karel Stepanek ("Carling") being bludgeoned to death and assume that the remainder of the premiss will be for the police to cotton on and capture the man we know to have committed the murder... Well, there is one great fly in that particular ointment and we have to wait until the last ten minutes or so to really find out that this has much more going on as we discover no lack of suspects or plausible plot lines that lead us to question what we know we saw at the start. Sonia Dresdel ("Steffy") is on good form and the small and well focussed cast keeps the suspense taut and engaging. The score and lighting add bundles to the mystery too - and with a soupçon of Nazi undertones the whole film is really quite a good watch.