Rent 80,000 Suspects (1963)

The Bed-Pan Telegraph - 80,000 Suspects review by CH

That phrase is coined by one of the staff in a Bath hospital, where - between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP - news has gone round the premises that a patient has arrived with a virus caught from her son who had returned a fortnight ago as steward on a Merchant Navy ship which set sail somewhere in the East.

Earlier that day, in the heavy snow of January 1st, 1963 (the Beatles duly recorded their LP on February 11th), a doctor, Richard Johnson, had been at a New Year's Eve party with his wife, a former nurse (Claire Bloom): the atmosphere was taunt with the presence of flighty Yvonne Dolan with whom Johnson had succumbed to a fling a while ago - as her husband, another colleague, suspected. Should ancient flings be forgot.

This was one of several early-Sixties films made by Val Guest in English towns and cities. There was Hell is a City (Manchester), Jigsaw (Brighton) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (London), all of which were thrillers with a noir tinge and a domestic undertow. Despite the dramatic subject, a virus which puts at risk of death the eponymous 80,000 Suspects (the number of Bath residents who have to be tracked and traced), the domestic angle in this film is more to the fore. That said, there is many a shot of those residents queuing by night and day for, well, a shot - often referred to as a scratch. Among them is a fat man who, as the needle descends, faints into Claire Bloom's arms, which is a leap, or rather a collapse, across time, for he was Graham Moffatt, a familiar stooge from Will Hay films in the Thirties (on which Val Guest had first worked).

A curious sight throughout the film is a huge device (the “Big Beast”) in which hospital staff have to put their clothes and possessions for decontamination. It resembles a cremator,; indeed, towards the end, Richard Johnson lists the professions (including prostitute) of those who have died and remarks, “the urn's always the same shape”, a phrase which has something of Sir Thomas Browne about it. In that end a fat man and a thin one wildly signal the same curves.

Happily, though, Claire Bloom is still with us, and soon after the appearance of the Beatles' LP and this film, one suspects that there was many a frisson as audiences saw that she was slightly slow to pull a towel around her curves when surprised during a necessary shower in the room next to the Big Beast. Those split-seconds must have compensated for the all-too-understanding soliloquies by Cyril Cusack as a Catholic priest.