Phillip Hannon (Van Johnson) is a famous American playwright living in London. An accident caused him to lose his sight. Now a bitter man he spends most of his time in isolation working with a tape recorder, fine tuning his next play. Hannon employs a butler/chauffer/secretary, Bob Matthews (Cecil Parker). Phil is visited by his former fiancé, Jean Lennox (Vera Miles). Jean is also from America and is still in love with Phil. Phil prefers to wallow in self-pity and sends Jean away.
Upset about the meeting, Phil goes down to the nearby pub for a drink. He prefers to hide his disability and so he sits alone against a partition between the men’s and women’s bars. Phil hears a conversation between a man and a woman who are sitting in the ladies’ bar. A man is playing a pinball machine across the room. Noise from the machine drowns out some of the conversation but Phil manages to hear most of a plot to kidnap someone.
Phil rushes home and puts on tape every word of the conversation he can remember. The man and woman were talking in low voices, but Phil’s hearing has been heightened due to his disability. He contacts Inspector Grovening (Maurice Denham) at Scotland Yard but without more to go on, the police think that his imagination is making an innocuous conversation into more than it really is. Phil contacts Jean and with her and Tom’s help, Phil launches his own investigation into the diabolical plot. A decision that puts Phil in the crosshairs of a killer.
“23 Paces to Baker Street” was released in 1956 and was directed by Henry Hathaway. It is an American thriller mystery and was based on the 1938 novel “Warrant for X” AKA “The Nursemaid who Disappeared” by Phillip MacDonald.
The movie is a bit of “Sorry Wrong Number” 1948 with “Cat O Nine Tails” 1971 and with a Hitchcockian flair. Many people actually compare the film to Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” 1954. Then there are others that compare the film to every other story with an antihero with some kind of disability. Fair enough.
I enjoyed the movie. There was a lot of nice cinematography throughout. The film is done in Cinemascope, so it looks impressive. The acting is good, and the story was interesting. Others felt that it was a little plodding but, to me, the slow burn was part of the mystery. It does have a similar feel to a Hitchcock film but is lacking in some of his nuances. Despite it not being a Hitchcock offering, it was still good in its own right.