I am massively behind with the "House of Hammer" podcast - months behind, but I'm still trying to catch up whenever I can and with the spirit I watched "A Stranger Came Home", or "The Unholy Four" if you prefer. It's a better premise for a movie, than in actual execution.
Four years after disappearing on a Portuguese trip, with his wife and three friends, Phillip Vickers (William Sylvester) suddenly reappears at his estate. Vickers is suspicious of his wife Angie (Paulette Goddard) as well as Job Crandall (Patrick Holt), Bill Saul (Paul Carpenter) and Harry Bryce, who are all attending a party that very night, so keeps what little he remembers about the disappearance to himself. Vickers becomes a suspect though when Bryce turns up dead, the morning after his return.
Again, the ideas of this noiry thriller are perhaps more interesting that what is ultimately provided. Part of the problem is perhaps that Vickers keeps what he's thinking to himself most of the time, especially when it comes to answering the question the other characters keep asking him "where have you been?" The murder on his first night back then leads to Russell Napier joining the film as Inspector Treheme. He joins a long line of . . . Unconventional police detectives in Hammer films, who seems to believe that Vickers did it, but not enough to take him in for questioning. The films principle failing is that, despite being just 80 minutes, it's not interesting enough to fill that time with anything other than the roundabout conversations and intimated accusations.
Performances are OK, Paulette Goddard is, as you might imagine, a class above the rest, even William Sylvester, who would be prominent in "2001. A Space Odyssey" a decade or so later. The main Hammer links are behind the camera this time, with Terence Fisher directing, but not much in the way of returning stars this time.
I say again, the premise of the film is actually reasonable interesting, but the execution is poor and the film is dull.
