BLACKOUT is one of the many crime/suspense/noir tales produced by Hammer Films in the early 1950s, before they turned their attention to science fiction and Gothic horror. This movie was first released in 1954, and it was titled MURDER BY PROXY in the United Kingdom. It was directed by Terence Fisher.
If you have any knowledge of the low-budget noirs made by Hammer, you'll be familiar with the main plot points of BLACKOUT. A down-and-out American in London comes across a duplicitous female, gets associated with a murder, and spends the rest of the film trying to clear his name.
An American named Casey Morrow (Dane Clark) is getting drunk at the bar in the hotel he is staying, when a gorgeous blonde (Belinda Lee) comes up to him and offers to give him 500 pounds if he marries her. Casey is in such a bad state he can hardly refuse...but he wakes up the next morning in someone else's apartment, with no knowledge of what happened the night before. Casey soon learns that the young woman who he supposedly married is Phyllis Brunner, the daughter of a rich businessman who was found murdered. Casey suspects he's being set up, and tries to find out what really happened, while dealing with Phyllis and the various associates of the dead man.
BLACKOUT isn't a bad movie, but whatever suspense it is supposed to have is mitigated by a screenplay that goes off on too many detours. This type of story needs an attitude of haunted desperation, and it certainly isn't here. At one point, while trying to avoid the authorities, Casey reconnects with his mother (who he hasn't seen in eight years) and also starts to develop real feelings for Phyllis. This sequence brings the proceedings to a halt. One gets the feeling that the script for BLACKOUT was written for a particular running time (the movie's length is about 90 minutes, which I think is too long for this type of material).
Another problem with BLACKOUT is that the main character of Casey doesn't instill warm feelings to the audience. It doesn't help that in the first scenes Casey is so drunk he can barely function. As an actor Dane Clark was something of a minor league John Garfield. He's okay here, but there's nothing about his character that is all that interesting. Clark tries to inject some light humor into what he's doing, but this falls flat.
One thing that must be said about BLACKOUT is that the female characters are far more stronger than the males. Even secretaries and Phyllis' middle-aged mother are more than a match for Casey. Belinda Lee was still only a teenager when she made this film, although you wouldn't believe that while watching her. Lee died in a car accident in 1961--if she had lived, she might have been as well remembered as her contemporary Diana Dors. (Terence Fisher had in fact already directed Dors a couple years earlier in a movie called MAN BAIT, also known as THE LAST PAGE, and I thought that Belinda Lee did a much better job in BLACKOUT than Dors did in the earlier film.) The most likable character in the film is the helpful Maggie, played by Eleanor Summerfield, who acted in a number of pictures directed by Terence Fisher during this period.
If, while watching BLACKOUT, you're going to be looking for any special "directorial moments" from Terence Fisher, you won't find any. BLACKOUT is made effectively, but there's nothing in it that sticks out, or reminds you of anything in Fisher's later career. The script was written by Richard Landau, who did a lot of work for Hammer at this time (he would later work on the script for THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, then spend most of his time in American television). The story offers no real surprises, and things are tidied up a bit too neatly at the end.
BLACKOUT is available on the Tubi streaming channel.
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