Payment Deferred

William Marble, a bank clerk in London, can no longer pay his family’s debts and is squeezed a little further every day. When his wealthy nephew comes to visit he asks him for a loan, and when the young man refuses he kills him in the garden and takes his money. What follows is a matter not of money but of conscience: the man changes along with the ease that has come to him, begins to suspect everyone in the house, and the price of the crime arrives from a direction he never expected. Lothar Mendes’s eighty one minute American film was adapted from a play and is about how easy it is to kill and how hard to carry what comes after. Charles Laughton plays Marble, with Maureen O’Sullivan and a young Ray Milland in the cast. It was completed in 1932.