Noir Alley Watch: Blackout (1954)

Watched:  06/14/2026

Format:  TCM on Noir Alley

Viewing:  First

Director:  Terence Fisher

A Hammer Noir from 1954, Blackout is a British produced and London-set film that I am mostly glad I watched with Eddie Muller's commentary.  It is... an oddball movie, certainly, feeling like it zigs and zags as to what the movie is about or is even doing, which is absolutely a way to keep an audience guessing.

I'm not a fan of star Dane Clark, who I've only seen a couple of times.  I won't get into ad hominem attacks, but he's not my cup of tea as a compelling person to watch on screen.  Here, he's sort of an American - but maybe not?  Who is down to his last shilling in a London hotel bar.  

Up walks Belinda Lee. who looks like a Robert Maguire painting come to life, and offers him a job, even though he's nearing "blackout" drunk.  Lee is...  something else, so who can blame him for taking her up on the offer? Especially when the job pays 500 pounds and is to marry Lee.

He wakes up the next morning in a stranger's apartment, is told he just turned up there by an artist Maggie (Eleanor Summerfield), and sees a huge portrait of the woman he thinks he married.  He wanders out into the street to find Lee's picture beside that of her slain father.

For the film's remaining runtime, he has to dodge the cops, figure out who is playing him and why, and whether Lee and he ever actually got married.

There's a few sequences that are quite good.  According to Muller, this is famed Hammer director Terence Fisher's break, and the general quality I associate with Fisher shows itself from time to time.  

For some reason there's a whole sojourn in an old neighborhood where we meet Clark's mother that feels completely separate from the rest of the film, and is the best bit.  There's also what seems a twisted and very dark ending - that the movie instead tosses into the fire to give the audience a happy ending that leaves the whole thing on a false note.

Lee is amazing on film - just one of those actors who the camera loves. Muller lets us know we likely don't know her because she worked in Europe and died very young in a car accident. 

I'm not sure I liked the movie too much.  Normally I'd like a movie that winds and twists, but here it feels like one of those exercises where you hand a story off every few pages to someone different who has to pick up the story, while doing their own thing.

My feeling is that this one won't stick with me very long, except for a few images here and there.  I've certainly seen cheaper and worse, but this one just felt like the B picture it really was - but worth seeing to see Fisher's work at this point, and what was happening in British noir.