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| Jack Warner as DI Fred Fellows. |
Detective Sargent Jim Wikes (Ronald Lewis) is sent to an
estate agents in Queens Road Brighton that has been broken into. The only thing
that appears to be missing is the lease of some rented properties. On checking one of the houses it’s discovered
that there has been a murder of a young women and an attempt to dismember and
hide her body. Sending one of the East
Sussex Constabulary’s most experienced police officers Detective Inspector Fred
Fellows (Jack Warner) to investigate, who determines that they have no idea of
the deceases identity only her initials and they are also unable to trace the
man whose name appears on the contract. A jigsaw of clues is laid out for both
the police and the more observant viewer but can they be pieced together to
find out who carried out this awful crime?
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| Ronald Lewis as DS Wilkes. |
Made with the full cooperation of the Chief Constables and
Officers of the County Borough of Brighton Police and the East Sussex
Constabulary, Val Guest’s 1961 police procedural Jigsaw has not aged as
well as Hell is a City, which was made
two years prior to this murder mystery. The director returned to the police
perception of the 1950’s, for example the insistence that the police are all
good sorts who ‘endure the arrogance
stupidity and apathy of the public’[1].
Again made on location in a provisional town and superbly
photographed by Arthur Grant, who took over as Hammers regular cameraman in
1961. Jack Warner was at this time the
face of the popular TV series Dixon of
Dock Green (1955-1978) appearing in 432 episodes as the formidable George
Dixon until he was eighty years old. As you would expect Warner looks like he
was born to be a no nonsense copper, but Guest gives him human sensibilities, a
love of football, a wee weight problem and the difficulties he has with giving
up cigarettes, and a man who finds it difficult to delegate.
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| A suspect is questioned! |
Guest’s screenplay, which was based on a Hilary Waugh novel Sleep Long My Love includes some great
characters that could only be found in a British movie and seem to live in a
vacuum of their own making. There’s the slimy salesman who uses his sales
techniques to entice lonely women into bed, a colour-blind deliveryman who says
he has a photographic memory but only in black and white, a fussy little
teacher who is excited to be involved in a murder investigation, a life long
virgin played by Yolande Donlan, and if you think you have seen the ‘glazier’
before its Gerald Campion who played the perennial schoolboy Billy Bunter in
the TV series between 1952 and 1961. Its these kind of character study’s that
makes this neatly plotted murder mystery so interesting.
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