So Long at the Fair (1951)

People are voting emotionally.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Blistering performances.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Brilliant thriller of suspense increasing all the way, until the absurd mystery ends up in a most surprising explanation. The best mysteries are the deepest and most inexplicable ones that all the same finally reveal a most logical solution. Jean Simmons' situation is really quite upsetting, she couldn't be more helpless in her predicament, but fortunately there is Dirk Bogarde at hand in a typical role of his as an English painter in Paris. The French people are also quite convincing, and fortunately they even speak French. It's easy for a foreigner to get lost in Paris with always strange things going on and bodies being fished up from the Seine almost every other day, and here there is even a world exhibition going on with the premiere of the Eiffel Tower and an awful balloon accident on top of that disposing of a key witness to add to poor Jean Simmons troubles... It's an ingenious intrigue, and every detail is important. It's vital that you don't miss anything of what is said in any conversation, since every piece in this puzzle is indispensable to the whole picture.

"So Long at the Fair" is a pleasant film with Hitchcockian dimensions--a psychological mystery that turns into a detective story.A young Englishwoman, Vicky Barton (Jean Simmons), and her brother Johnny (David Tomlinson) travel to Paris for the Exposition of 1889. She is excited to experience the fair--with its new wonder, the Eiffel Tower--but her joy turns to panic when she discovers that her brother is missing and there is no trace of him. A young artist named George Hathaway (Dirk Bogarde) becomes an ally in her quest to prove that Johnny is actually missing.Ms. Simmons performance is charming and convincing, reminding me of Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark". Mr. Bogarde plays the handsome, helpful stranger very well, and the two of them work well together.Though this film may not pack the punch of a film like "Rear Window", it is enjoyable, primarily due to the story (taken from a novel) and the chemistry between the actors.

Set in Paris in 1889 on the eve of the Great Exhibition. Victoria (Jean Simmons) and her brother Johnny (David Tomlinson)arrive in the packed city for the event. On the following morning, Victoria awakes to find that her brother and his hotel room have completely disappeared and everybody denies his existence. The police refuse to believe her story, but she finds help from an English artist, George (Dirk Bogarde), who was at the hotel on the day they checked in and he specifically remembers Johnny because he asked him for change for a one hundred franc note in order to pay a cab driver. George and Victoria check into the hotel and tries to solve the mystery behind Johnny's disappearance...A handsomely mounted period mystery thriller from Rank, which is of interest because it is one of the first major films to be directed by Terence Fisher who, following a subsequent spell making routine b-pics, was to go on to become a key player in the British horror wave of the late fifties and sixties via Hammer making such classics as Dracula, The Curse Of Frankenstein and The Mummy among others.The plot offers the ideal training ground for his subsequent excursions into the horror genre and his best films had a strong emphasis on character and a feeling for place and period. On the former it is not entirely successful as the potential romance between Bogarde - here looking like the perfect matinée idol he was intended to be - and Simmons is poorly developed. Yet, the feel for 1880's Paris is extremely well conveyed thanks to superb costume, set design and Reginald Wyer's atmospheric black and white cinematography. Fisher does display his knack for a well knit storyline and succeeds in generating some tension from a storyline that would have been right up Hitchcock's street. Some reviews that I read for this noted similarities with The Lady Vanishes but, naturally, as they themselves pointed out this of course comes nowhere near as good as that film.An excellent supporting cast includes Cathleen Nesbitt, Honor Blackman and Marcel Poncin as well as Andre Morell who would later turn up in several of Hammer's better films such as The Hound Of The Baskervilles - the latter for Fisher in which he gave a superb portrayal of Dr Watson.The reasons behind Johnny's disappearance and why everybody goes to great pains to deny that he was ever in Paris will keep you hooked right up until the end. But, for me, the final revelation when it came was something of a disappointment as it was nowhere near as dark and sinister as I was expecting. In fact, for 82 minutes I was expecting so much from it and when the words The End appeared on the screen I was left thinking: 'Well, is that it'?!

Not many people know that the basic plot of this film is based on a real life event that took place during the 1889 Great Exhibition in Paris. There are major differences of course; for a start, the young woman arrived with her mother and not brother as depicted in the film. Secondly, they arrived directly from India and not Italy. Ironically, the 1955 TV Episode 'Into Thin Air' - part of Alfred Hitchcock presents - is far closer to the truth than the 1950 feature film.But I agree to the change of plot because casting the missing person as the brother gives the story more flexibility. That said, the script should have been far more exciting than the rather bland fare that the director had to cope with. There was plenty of scope for a brilliant thriller with plenty of red herrings, something which Hitchcock would have exploited with glee - as he already had done in his 'The Lady Vanishes' and would do so again in the aforementioned TV episode.