Poison Pen (film)

Poison Pen is a 1939 film directed by Paul L. Stein, starring Flora Robson, Reginald Tate and Ann Todd. It was based on the 1937 play by Richard Llewellyn.

The film version was made by the Associated British Picture Corporation at their Elstree studios and opened in London onJuly 1939. Flora Robson and Reginald Tate inherited the leading roles played on stage by Margaret Yarde and Walter Fitzgerald. Robsons character name Phryne Rainrider in the play was simplified to plain Mary Rider. The only actor common to both play and film was Roddy Hughes. Novelist Graham Greene, at that time film critic of The Spectator, called it a deplorable example of an English film which tries to create an English atmosphere. Latterly, however, it has been described by film historian David Quinlan as a slow, sordid but striking dark drama and by Raymond Durgnat as a bleak story prefiguring Clouzots Le Corbeau.The calm of a peaceful English village is shattered when a series of anonymous letters starts being delivered to village homes, containing scurrilous allegations about the recipients and their families. Upstanding and respectable inhabitants find themselves and their loved ones accused in lascivious detail of all manner of moral, sexual and criminal misdeeds. The Reverend Rider Tate and his sister Mary Robson attempt to defuse the increasing consternation of the villagers by pointing out that the letters should be ignored as the malicious nonsense they are. Their efforts meet with little success, and Riders daughter Ann Todd also becomes a target with lewd accusations being made about her fianc David Geoffrey Toone. ........

Source: Wikipedia