The Green Man

Hawkins runs a watchmaker's shop. That is not his actual work: he kills people for money, and his method is a bomb. Having disposed of a dictator and a millionaire, he takes a new job. The target is a government minister on his way to a seaside hotel, The Green Man, for a private meeting with his secretary. Hawkins puts the bomb in the hotel's radio. At that exact moment William Blake, selling vacuum cleaners door to door, walks into the wrong room and sees everything. Blake has to stop the bomb going off, and nobody believes a word he says. Robert Day directs the British film; eighty minutes, with Alastair Sim as Hawkins, George Cole as Blake and Terry-Thomas in the cast. It is adapted from a play by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, who also wrote the screenplay. It is black comedy, built not on who dies but on who cannot manage to convince anybody.