Face the Music (The Black Glove) - I watched this 1954 Hammer production noir and either couldn't sync up with it or maybe it was just a subpar movie. Not subpar as in distractingly bad acting or cheap production values. You can't really blame director Terence Fisher either since he went on to helm numerous Hammer films including my personal favorite,
The Devil Rides Out. The movie's shortcomings had more to do with the bland and confusing script. It was written by Ernest Borneman who, according to IMDb, had only nine other nondescript writing credits. James Bradley (Alex Nicol) is a hotshot American jazz trumpet player, newly arrived in London and headlining at the Palladium. There's a quick setup involving his manager Maxie Margulies (John Salew) who apparently is supposed to provide comic relief. But, like so many other aspects of the script, it never really lands. Anyway, Maxie is exasperated and Bradley is jet lagged but on the way home for some much needed sleep he hears a woman singing (from inside a taxi a half block away and down in a basement club no less).
He meets Maxine Halbard (Ann Hanslip) and she ends up inviting him home for one of those 2 AM home cooked dinners. He eventually leaves but forgets his trumpet case only to be woken up by the police the next morning. Halbard has been found murdered, shot by a .45 caliber pistol. That's another thing, for a country that's known for being relatively gun free there's a surprising number of citizens packing heat. The cops don't actually arrest Bradley which leaves him free to conduct his own little investigation. He meets the dead woman's sister Barbara Quigley (Eleanor Summerfield) and Johnny Sutherland (Paul Carpenter) the man who broke her heart by running off with, you guessed it, her sister Maxine. There's a lot of characters introduced, most involved in the London jazz scene. Bradley does his amateur sleuth due diligence until it's time to reveal the actual killer. But it's all so inert that when the perpetrator was eventually unmasked it failed to make much of an impression. This has no rating on Rotten Tomatoes, either critic or audience. And that just about sums this movie up.
45/100