The Long Memory

Philip Davidson was convicted of a murder he did not commit and is released after twelve years. Once out, he finds the witnesses who lied in court, one by one. The film does not quite build a revenge story; it describes the place where a man is caught between revenge and starting again, and leaves the answer to the viewer. Robert Hamer directed, from Howard Clewes’s 1951 novel. John Mills leads, with John McCallum and Elizabeth Sellars in the cast. Part of it was shot on the marshes of the Medway estuary and in Gravesend, which is where the film’s bare shoreline comes from. It belongs to Hamer’s post-Ealing period and stands among the few real examples of British noir.