Sapphire
Directed by Basil Dearden
Written by Janet Green and Lukas Heller
1959/UK
Artna Films/The Rank Organization
First viewing/FilmStruck
[box] Superintendent Robert Hazard: We didn’t solve anything, Phil. We just picked up the pieces.[/box]
I enjoyed this both as a mystery and as a glimpse of race relations in late ’50’s Britain.
Before the credits roll, we see the body of a young woman dumped in a park. Scotland Yard begins to work the case with hardly a shred of evidence. When a student at the Royal Academy of Music turns up missing, they have their victim, Sapphire. Classmates lead the investigators to her brother and her boyfriend. The brother, a doctor, arrives from Birmingham. It is then that they discover the brother is black and that Sapphire had been passing as white. Soon after, an autopsy reveals that she was pregnant.
The boyfriend is white and discovered the truth about Sapphire’s heritage at about the time he learned she was pregnant. He was the great hope of his bigoted working class family and will lose a scholarship to study architecture in Rome if he marries. Nonetheless, the family claims they supported the marriage. None of this rings true to the investigators. At the same time, they are following up leads to Sapphire’s former boyfriends in the black community. With Bernard Miles as the boyfriend’s father.
This is a pretty good who-done-it. I thought I had the perpetrator spotted for the entire film and was proved wrong – a plus in my book. The movie does feel a bit stretched out by obvious red herrings but it works. The more interesting aspect is the gamut of views on race portrayed in the film, including those of blacks. One of the investigators finds it almost impossible to stay objective but there are plenty of other more tolerant folk, including the other investigator. It’s not a masterpiece or anything, but if the topic appeals I would say go for it.
Sapphire won the BAFTA award for Best British Film.
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