The Green Man

An irreverent black comedy adapted by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat from their play, Meet a Body, The Green Man marked the directorial debut of camera operator Robert Day.A scintillating Alastair Sim plays Hawkins, a timid watchmaker with a part time job – he is also a professional assassin who bumps off the people we love to hate. But when the philandering MP Sir Gregory Upshott (Raymond Huntley) is the intended target, vacuum cleaner salesman William Blake (George Cole) and Hawkins' new neighbour Ann Vincent (Jill Adams) repeatedly get in the way. As the time of the assassination draws ever closer and Hawkins tracks his victim to a dilapidated seaside hotel called the Green Man, the laughs and the tension steadily rise to a brilliant climax.An enormously entertaining farce that ticks all the genre's boxes (mistaken identities, compromising positions, much panicking and slamming of doors), the film makes an interesting companion piece to Ealing's The Ladykillers (1955).