The Case of Charles Peace (1949) User Reviews

Good little production...

[academician-1 · 7/10 · 17 January 2010]

This seems to be "doing the rounds" again now, after being digitally remastered and a new copyright of 2009 added to it.

It is an entertaining film about the strange double-life lead by Charlie Peace. A respected local business man by day, but with a quick and nasty temper that would only occasionally show through his more civilised persona during the day.

At night he was a professional thief and raided houses in Manchester (UK) amongst other places. He was however a nasty and ruthless character who seemed not to hesitate to kill when he was cornered.

I am at a loss to understand why history has been so kind to his memory? I remember reading a regular cartoon strip of his "exploits" in a comic as a child back in the 1970s, where he was portrayed as a "likable rogue" who was quick and could outwit the Police at every twist and turn. Even in the comic, he was not a good-looking individual and so should have been easy to identify for the Police. Perhaps like Dick Turpin, the British like a likable rogue, even if the truth is a lot less pleasant than the popular legend would have you believe? The film is relatively short and deals with his trial and so uses that to show you what he did. It is based on the official records, but left me feeling like it was only half a film - Either a lot was left out of the film, or the popular legends about him ascribe a great deal more to him than he ever did in real life.

An enjoyable film that is certainly a 6 or 7 out of 10. If it is accurate, then there is little you can do about that, but if some of his exploits were indeed left out, then I wish they had been included in this film to round it out a bit more. Worth watching if you get the opportunity to see it.

It does leave me wondering how many more of these "forgotten" little black and white gems there are that were made in Britain? Hopefully they will all see the light of day again in time...

I Wouldn't Believe Him If He Said "Hello"

[boblipton · 6/10 · 9 November 2020]

Michael Martin Harvey is Charles Peace in this odd little movie about his adult days as a thief and a murderer. It all seems rather chaotic, but I believe that was the intention, as Harvey goes around killing people and blacking his face, and claiming to have black outs to the endless confusion of the police. Apparently in England in those days, unless you said "It's a fair cop" when a bobby put his hand on your shoulder, there wasn't much anyone could do.

Peace had been a subject for the movies since at least 1905, and this movie doesn't attempt to whitewash him in any way; indeed, Harvey's performance seems perfectly insincere all the way through, a smart, tough little man who says the things people expect him to say, hoping to keep them confused all the way through, even as he claims to have been saved, confesses to a murder that another man is about to be hanged for, and asks the press not to make targets of his children.

Peace be with you

[mappman728 · 5/10 · 2 October 2014]

Factually accurate but very plodding and pedestrian telling of the criminal life of the notorious Victorian burglar and murderer, Charles Peace. Performances are out of amateur hour in many instances, although stalwarts such as Valentine Dyall and Ronald Adam manage to rise above the lacklustre script. Michael Martin-Harvey enjoys himself as Peace and brings the film to life despite, or because of, his uncanny resemblance to Frank Randle in one of his more manic phases. Unlikely to be of much interest unless, like me, you hail from Sheffield, Peace's home town. If you do hail from Sheffield, you may also note that the film seems to have been shot in the Home Counties rather than the industrial north...

Entertaining if a little confusing

[Marlburian · 7/10 · 2 December 2022]

I thought better of TCOCP than other IMBD reviewers, and it seems to have kept to the actual events better than many films "based on facts". Michael Martin Harvey did very well in portraying Peace's various personalities and he bore a resemblance to some of the varying portraits that exist of the murderer. But it was difficult to imagine him attracting so many women - though I suspect that the actresses were better looking the women they portrayed, as is suggested by contemporary drawings, and one authority on Peace states that Mrs Dyson was an "'attractive woman, buxom and blooming ... and ugly men can be notably successful with women". Certainly Chili Bouchier spoke with remarkably refined accent - though this was not nearly as incongruous as that of Robert Cameron playing an Irish rough, John Habron.

I spent some minutes trying to work out who Roberta Huby as "Mrs Thompson" reminded me of - it was Miranda Richardson playing Elizabeth 1 in "Blackadder"!

I struggled a little to keep up with Peace's exploits, and it may be that the film showed them in a different sequence to what actually happened. I was surprised when, just before his execution, he referred to his children, as I don't think that they had been mentioned before.

Would have been a great Tod Slaughter film

[Leofwine_draca · 5/10 · 14 October 2014]

While watching THE CASE OF CHARLES PEACE, I couldn't help but wondering how this would have turned out as a Tod Slaughter movie. Certainly given Slaughter's propensity for barnstorming performances, it would have been entertaining stuff - more entertaining than it turned out to be with this genteel, laid-back story of crime and murder.

Charles Peace was a famous Mancunian who lived a double life as a kindly family man by day and ruthless burglar/murderer by night. He's played here by the long forgotten Michael Martin-Henry, who's not bad, but gives a relatively restrained performance given the subject matter.

Unfortunately, the film itself is a bit of a dud, as it never manages to pick up speed despite the intriguing storyline. I didn't like the courtroom wraparound part of the film, as it saps the narrative of both vigour and pace. The depiction of the various crimes isn't bad but there's a definite lack of the kind of suspense you'd expect, leaving this as an interesting curio and nothing more.

Where is Holmes When You Need Him?

[rmax304823 · 5/10 · 26 July 2015]

We learn from the narrator that Charles Peace, living in Sheffield around 1876, was a murderer who was brought to justice and convicted in a celebrated case.

I love these stories about early murderers if they're well done. "The Crimes of William Palmer" gave us not just suspense and horror but depth of character.

It's lacking here. Every element of the film is competent but completely lacking in poetry. If Charlie Peace looked anything like Michael Martin Harvey, the actor who portrays him, I feel sorry for Peace. Harvey's entire skull looks as if it had been put through a duck press and his features squished together. And his speech is alarmingly sinister.

I don't mean to suggest that it's a terrible movie. But the acting, with some exceptions, is about at a par with what you and I could deliver. The direction is pedestrian and sometimes confusing. The musical score sounds like one of Hollywood's B mysteries featuring Charlie Chan or someone of that ilk.

It could have been a gripping tale. Peace himself was what the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would call "antisocial personality disorder, unsocialized type." In the old days they would have called him a moral idiot.

He was textbook perfect -- the seductions, the thievery, the shootings, the different identities, the self confidence, the instantaneous lies. It's all there.

His prey, the nice Mrs. Katherine Dyson, is an ambiguous figure. She convinces us by her manner that she's telling the truth when she gives testimony that condemns Peace, yet there is a lingering question about continuity. It's one of those scenes that cries out for the trite question from the defense: "Were you lying then or are you lying now?" Thank God nobody says it.

It's worth watching as a curiosity and as a depiction of an historical event but, sorry, it lacks élan.

Better than I expected

[thesufi · 8/10 · 18 June 2013]

This little gem of a movie deserves wider recognition. I'd never heard of it until I stumbled upon it one afternoon on the UK MoviesForMen channel.

You certainly get a great sense of the Victorian Era in Britain in which it is set and Peace, as played by Michael Martin Harvey makes a chillingly credible sociopath. He put me in mind somehow of Richard Attenborough's seedy Christie in 10 Rillington Place.

The only criticism I could make is that Harvey was maybe a little old for the lead role as he looks the wrong side of 60! The courtroom scenes are also very realistic.

I wonder how it came to be forgotten.

'A mixture of childlike simplicity and cunning evil.'

[scorfield-51711 · 4/10 · 22 October 2023]

The only starring role for Michael Martin Harvey, more typically cast as a bit player, such as the mullah in Alexander Korda's 'The Drum'. He would never attain the acclaim his parents received, especially that of his father, the Edwardian actor-manager, Sir John Martin Harvey, most renowned for playing Sydney Carton in his own stage and screen adaptation of Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities'. Though playing the eponymous and notorious Victorian murderer and burglar, Martin Harvey's performance is more impish than malevolent.

The film plays out like a solid TV courtroom drama with even the preamble to the central narrative being presented as an interesting case to serve as training material for the recruits at Hendon Police College. This is given a degree of gravitas by the appearance of professional voice actor, Valentine Dyall, as the narrator to this presentation of these real-life events. Written and directed by Norman Lee, an Elstree man who wrote the screenplays for a few of George Formby comedies, this second-to-last feature of his career serves as his swan-song. If the plot has one flaw, this is the unnecessary confusion surrounding the timeline of events between he murders of a policeman in Manchester and that of Peace's neighbour near Sheffield.

After being maimed in an industrial accident as a child labourer, Peace turned to a life of crime. His first brush with the law came when he was arrested for a spate of burglaries in 1854 and sentenced to four years. Upon his release, he married the widow, Hannah Ward, and, seemingly to all outward appearances, settled down to a law-abiding life as a picture-framer. Yet, he continued his housebreaking activities, and on the point of capture shot down the unfortunately named PC Cock at Whaley Range, Manchester in August 1876. For this murder, an innocent young Irish labourer was sentenced for execution, which his girlfriend and friends' tireless campaigning had commuted for life. In the meantime, Peace had became obsessed with his neighbour's wife, to the point where a summons was futilely taken out against him. Peace continued to harass the couple at their new address and eventually shot and murdered her husband, Arthur Dyson on 29th November 1876. A hue and cry, as well as a £100 reward for his capture was raised after his flight. It would be after another rash of burglaries in Blackheath in London that he was finally detained in another scuffle with the police where he shot and injured another police officer. Married under an assumed name, his wife gave his true identity away.

This is not the first cinematic treatment of Peace's story with a 1905 silent movie covering the same narrative. With regard to this feature, a strong supporting cast of relative unknowns is headed by the once British 'It-Girl', Chili Bouchier, as Mrs Dyson, the nature of whose relationship with Peace, and whether she witnessed her husband grapple with the assailant becomes the lynchpin of the defence lawyer's case at the celebrated trial. Bouchier, once proposed to by magnate Howard Hughes, here retains her pre-war beauty to convincingly play the femme fatale, despite her Irish accent faltering badly.

This feature's main weakness is the singular lack of melodrama, as it sticks so rigidly to court records of the events in question. The plodding, pedestrian pace is even true of the storyline's presentation of the plight of the innocent young Irishman, William Habron, finally able to clear his name with Peace's final hour confession.

Grim viewing!

[rxelex · 2/10 · 20 July 2020]

This must have been a quota quickie in both subject, casting and filming. The acting is as bad as any cheap soap opera though the cast all have a uniformly hard, lined and s0mehow wartime look that is never seen these days. One or two affect a Yorkshire accent as unconvincing as any non-Yorkshire can manage. The court scene shows the courtroom stuffed with bewigged men of unknown duties who must all have been nearly brain dead from the boredom and trivia of their work hours. I managed to watch to the fiftenn minutes mark before abandoning it.

No peace for the guilty.

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 30 May 2023]

If there's anything true about the title character in this British melodrama based on a true case, Charles Peace was filled with delusions. Delusional to think that a friendly young woman could be in love with him, a rather skeletal looking 50 year old man, skinny and ill-tempered and based on evidence, perhaps the victim of a split personality. I'd say that British character actor Michael Martin Harvey, who was the perfect age and physical fit for the character, was brilliant casting, and no one else comes to mind that could have done better.

Peace was accused of the murder of the husband of the young woman he believed to be in love with him, and she's a major character in the film, in more scenes than Peace's wife (Jean Shepeard). As Katherine Dyson, Chili Bouchier is beautiful and ladylike, and her friendship with Peace becomes strained when he becomes obsessed with her. The film is told as a flashback, and in the flashback of the trial are flashbacks of the actual events leading up to the trial. Another story involves the fight to prove another man innocent of another murder that Peace committed. It is a bit perplexing withits structure, but as a study of Victorian era crime still fascinating. Slow moving quite a bit, but when it begins to come together, the slow parts become worth sitting through.

Gradely...!

[richardchatten · 8/10 · 2 March 2020]

Norman Lee made only one more film before giving up directing films to become a novelist. Too bad, as he was on a roll after the war, as this little gem - which deserves to be much better known - attests.

Britain as usual felt itself to be experiencing a crime wave after the war, but violent crime was nothing new, as this Victorian melodrama amply demonstrates, in which a copper gets shot seventy years before 'The Blue Lamp'.

Poor old Sheffield always gets a raw deal from movies, and in recent years has unfairly been made to look an urban hell in 'Looks and Smiles' (1981) and 'The Full Monty' (1997); and although far less built-up during the 1870's is still depicted in this film as a den of vice and violent crime.

An interesting supporting cast including Chili Bouchier, Valentine Dyall and Hamilton Deane as the judge who sentences Peace to death is enhanced by the bold decision to resist the temptation to cast Tod Slaughter in the title role and instead give the lead to Michael Martin-Harvey - usually a bit player, but who absolutely makes the role his own: investing the part with a small stature, a deceptively mousy appearance, but an enormous personality.

A fascinating study of a well known killer.

[Sleepin_Dragon · 8/10 · 14 November 2020]

A thoroughly enjoyable movie, and a true story. Michael Martin Harvey does a wonderful job bringing Peace to life. He portrays him as charismatic and enigmatic, a larger than life figure, who used his confidence tricks to cheat those around him. He shows some real versatility in the part.

Shocking yo think he got away with so many crimes, although from the movie we get that he was a very convincing, devious man. Don't be convinced by the early courtroom scenes, which are a little sluggish, it develops very nicely as it progresses.

It's a well made film, nicely edited, well acted, and definitely not boring. I found the fight scenes pretty convincing, better than many today.

Very watchable, 8/10