Daybreak

A barber is keeping an identity hidden. Nobody knows what the man does apart from his daytime work. As the secret begins to come out his life comes apart with it, and the matter ends in tragedy. The film builds its tension not through pursuit but through the weight of the thing being hidden. The Thames and the country around it are the setting of the account. It comes from the noir vein of British cinema in 1948. The seventy five minutes turn around a single secret. The account keeps the secret back for a long time and draws its tension from that. Ann Todd and Eric Portman take the leads, with Bill Owen and Maxwell Reed also in the cast. Compton Bennett’s British film was completed in 1948.