After an arresting opening murder scene, THE VOICE OF MERRILL soon becomes one of the stodgiest murder mysteries I've seen from Britain in the 1950s. It wasn't until the mid to late part of the decade that British thrillers started to become more influenced by the American film noir/crime thriller genre, thus incorporating more action and incident into the narratives.
Certainly THE VOICE OF MERRILL comes across as a rather dated and ho-hum sort of film with a story that barely registers. The viewer is introduced to four separate characters, each of whom has a motive for committing the early murder: there's the up-and-coming author (played by THEY WERE NOT DIVIDED's Edward Underdown), the snobbish literary figure (played by James Robertson Justice, doing his best Orson Welles impersonation) and his wife, and the shifty publisher (Henry Kendall, of THE GHOST CAMERA fame).
Much of this film seems to get bogged down in radio play material which doesn't really add anything, plus an unwelcome romantic sub-plot between Underdown and the wife character. The latter is played by the lovely Valerie Hobson (WEREWOLF OF London), still an alluring beauty some twenty years after she first came to fame. Sam Kydd has a larger supporting role than usual as one of the younger detectives investigating the case. John Gilling, who later became one of Hammer's go-to guys in the 1960s, could usually be relied upon to direct more entertaining produce than this.
Certainly THE VOICE OF MERRILL comes across as a rather dated and ho-hum sort of film with a story that barely registers. The viewer is introduced to four separate characters, each of whom has a motive for committing the early murder: there's the up-and-coming author (played by THEY WERE NOT DIVIDED's Edward Underdown), the snobbish literary figure (played by James Robertson Justice, doing his best Orson Welles impersonation) and his wife, and the shifty publisher (Henry Kendall, of THE GHOST CAMERA fame).
Much of this film seems to get bogged down in radio play material which doesn't really add anything, plus an unwelcome romantic sub-plot between Underdown and the wife character. The latter is played by the lovely Valerie Hobson (WEREWOLF OF London), still an alluring beauty some twenty years after she first came to fame. Sam Kydd has a larger supporting role than usual as one of the younger detectives investigating the case. John Gilling, who later became one of Hammer's go-to guys in the 1960s, could usually be relied upon to direct more entertaining produce than this.