Don't get me wrong, I love classic cinema. Hawks, Ford, Wilder, Hitchcock, you name it.
But the fact that a film is old, in black and white and with good photography doesn't mean that it's good. The way this film is put together is representative of a very naive and simple-minded way of storytelling.
The main culprit (though not the only one), is the script. Characters are not believably defined, it's all broad strokes. The main concern is the plot, instead of the humans that make it move. And the structure, while risky, has its problems too.
I can offer some examples of this:
1) When the hero woos Linda, there is nothing playful about the way he does it. Instead, he merely overflatters her. He makes himself look silly, in no way charming. This man is supposed to be intelligent.
2) Later in the film, when Rattery mistreats Linda, who is supposed to be the hero's girlfirend, he witnesses it and does nothing about it. And Linda basically accepts it.
3) At the beggining of the movie, we have a scene between a lawyer, called Nigel, and his girlfriend. It's a very long scene whose only purpose is to give us plot information. The girlfriend is never seen again, and the Nigel character is almost irrelevant to the plot.
There's good cinematography here and there, but the technique at times is also quite clumsy. There is a scene where a woman is shaking up a child, and the way it's shot and edited, it feels completely awkward. In some shots the child doesn't move but shouts off-camera, and the scene feels unreal.
Most of the performances are very broad, a lot of the times the plot moves via uninteresting and unsubtle dialogue, and the characters are simply not clearly defined. Rattery is simply a very bad person, there's very little that we can say about him, aside from that. And the hero is, well, a perfect guy: smart, elegant, well-natured... There are no nuances, no moral ambiguites, nothing. So it all plays like an old fashioned mystery stage play, where everything is naive, dumb and phony.
Ibáñez Menta, of course, was a great actor, but he didn't have a clear charater to play here, and as a leading man he's terribly unattractive.
