I've been seeking out Alastair Sim movies of late and The Green Man turned up in a box set of his movies from the UK. I had seen it before but not since 1996. It's a 1965 crime comedy with Alastair as a hit man on a mission. The title refers to The Green Man, a seaside hotel, the very place where Alastair plans to off his next target with a bomb. That's Alastair's favorite method of delivering death to his victims. The assignment proves challenging as Alastair finds a steady stream of problems in his path.
George Cole plays a vacuum cleaner salesman who stops in at a house to drum up some business. Jill Adams plays the fiancée of the man who owns the house. She was waiting to meet her fiancée there when George knocked. George finds the body that Alastair's henchman left in the house. Alastair lives next door, the secretary had come to confront him about his plan to blow up her boss. George and Ann think the secretary is dead. She revives to warn them that her boss is to be killed at The Green Man with a bomb, then she passes out or on. Ann and George figure they should go warn the man. They cause chaos in the hotel when they get there.
There's a good cast, I knew Terry-Thomas, Raymond Huntley, Colin Gordon, Richard Wattis, Arthur Lowe, Peter Bull, Willoughby Goddard and Michael Ripper. The ones I didn't know where fine too. Alastair is brilliant in this, drolly going about his deadly business.
There's plenty of mayhem and yelling, even a bomb going off. It's all the work of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, they wrote the original 1937 play The Body Was Well-Nourished. It didn't get on stage until 1940 and it only lasted three weeks because of the Blitz. In 1954 it was re-staged as Meet A Body and it ran 14 weeks. It was produced by Laurence Oliver but he wasn't in it.
Launder and Gilliat rewrote it once more for the screenplay and Robert Day and Basil Dearden directed. The IMDb says Sim had some arguments with first time director Day and Dearden stepped in to direct some scenes, as did Gilliat and Launder. No matter, the finished product was fun to watch and it will be one that I would watch again.
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