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Cloudburst from 1951 with Robert Preston, Elizabeth Sellers and Colin Tapley
Post-war British cinema tells stories slightly differently than American cinema as the British efforts are usually quieter and more layered than the American ones with their penchant for noisier drama and elaborate special effects.
Cloudburst, a British-noir-detective-story combination with a romantic overlay and several murders, goes about its business with a wonderfully British stiff upper lip. A happily married middle-aged couple who, it is implied, met in a concentration camp during the war have a bond that exceeds one from a normal marriage owing to that harrowing start.
When his pregnant wife is killed in an apparent hit and run accident, husband Robert Preston immediately shifts gears from a loving spouse to a man on an all-consuming personal revenge mission. In a movie construct that's been used before and after, we see a man going rogue, who we then learn is no ordinary man.
He is a former British spy and cryptologist. A man who has been trained by his government to conceal his identity, to hunt down enemies, to engage in hand-to-hand combat and to use everything at his disposal as a weapon. He is a dangerous man.
Being British, Preston goes about his hunt for the two who were in the car that killed his wife with a surface calm masking an internal fervor. As he uses all his espionage skills and connections, including former members of his WWII underground team who are still loyal to him, we see an individual frighteningly equipped to kill in a "what did the government create in this man'' way.
Matching wits with Preston is the relentless, yet outwardly placid British police superintendent who finds his way to Preston based on a seemingly innocuous clue, a note written in code accidentally left at the scene of one of Preston's revenge murders. The inspector asks Preston to decode the note in hopes it will lead to the killer.
We, thus, have Preston, a famous cryptologist, now working with the police to find the murderer, who he just happens to be. So while Preston appears to be helping the police to find himself, he, naturally, uses his role as consultant to the police to try to throw them off course. (This is an effective plot construct that has been employed often in movies like, for example, 1987's No Way Out).
(Spoiler alert) The rest of the movie is super smart Preston keeping the super-smart police inspector at bay just long enough for Preston to complete his revenge mission. When it's over, Preston has extracted all the revenge he wanted just as the police finally put all the pieces together and come to arrest him.
Cloudburst is, more than anything, a deeply sad movie. The lives of a good man and woman are destroyed when the man's wife is seemingly senselessly killed. While we are rooting for Preston to get away with his revenge killings (sorry, but we are), you see at the end, he simply doesn't care if he gets caught as long as he completes his mission. He, effectively, died the day his wife and unborn child were killed.
Kudos, once again, to post-war British cinema for delivering, in Cloudburst, a solid effort, on a small budget with quintessentially understated British style.