The Shop at Sly Corner

Oskar Homolka is an antiques dealer with a daughter, Muriel Pavlow, who is studying to be a concert violinist. He is well respected and kindly, with a wide circle of friends that includes Derek Farr, a Royal Navy surgeon who brings him oddities from across the world. Farr is in love with his daughter. His other friends in Garry Marsh, at Scotland Yard, and Manning Whitley, a burglar from whom he buys stolen goods. He tells Whitley he's getting out of that line of business; he understands Whitley's disappointment, but he worries about public exposure, since he's wanted in France for having escaped from Devil's Island for murder. They part on good terms. However, Homolka's shop assistant, Kenneth Griffith, has overheard the conversation and begins to blackmail Homolka.

It's produced and directed by George King, best known as a director of cheap quota quickies in the 1930%, who had a lot of success directing Tod Slaughter n old-line melodramas. In the 1940s, King's star rose, and he was in charge of some fine programmers.

This one is in line with the melodramas he had directed in the previous decade. So long as he is concentrating on Homolka, it is a first-rate character study of a kind man under pressure. In the final third, he falls back into some of his habits as a director of cheap movies, most obviously during a car chase sequence.

Still, it's mostly a fine movie, almost entirely due to Homolka, and a pleasure to watch.