Abbigail Bush
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Mehdi Hoffman
There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.
Derrick Gibbons
An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.
boblipton
This is one of those British quota quickies in which the only name I recognize is cinematographer Ernest Palmer. It starts out with John Stuart getting engaged to Judy Kelly, some talk about the household ghost, the Black Abbot, then Miss Kelly's father is kidnapped.It's a lesser variety of the British Locked Room mystery, with silly-ass humor and servants canoodling each other. Palmer's camera-work is wonderful -- lots of moving shots --but the performances are all over the shop, indicating that director George Cooper either couldn't afford to hire decent actors for the smaller roles, or couldn't direct actors for beans. At 54 minutes it's bearable, but I won't be revisiting.
malcolmgsw
This is an archetypal quota quickie made by the studios that specialised in making quota quickies for distribution by American film companies thereby circumventing the protectionist provisions of the 1928 Quota Act.So this film is 56 minutes long which will mean that Twickenham would have been paid £5600 by Radio Pictures.So Twickenhams profit would be that amount less the actual cost of production.So every method that could be used would be adopted to cut costs.These are all evident here.A thriller in a country house where the action takes place at night means that sets used previously can be fertilized.Editing is cut to a minimum.This means that actors are grouped together so when it comes time for them to say their lines they walk towards the camera,say their lines and walk back to their original marks.It is a bonus to add in an American character actor,in this case Ben Welden.This merely impresses the British audience as there is no chance that RKO Radio will release it in the states.The title is the most sinister aspect of this film.
Leofwine_draca
This 'old dark house' movie misses the mark by quite a wide berth, given that it goes for the comic approach throughout but just isn't very funny. Much of the humour here is rather broad and laboured, and some characters - like the maid with the runny nose - are intensely irritating rather than amusing.THE BLACK ABBOT follows your usual template of having assorted characters holed up in a mansion and assailed by a mysterious figure. The usual round of disappearances and criminality ensues, with some characters acting suspiciously and others adopting the mantle of amateur sleuth.I was intrigued by the horror-sounding aspects of the title, half expecting this to be an Edgar Wallace adaptation, but the titular figure is a red herring and barely appears and the rest of it is barely adequate.
wrbtu
A rather silly British comedy-mystery that takes place in an old mansion & an adjoining monastery which is supposedly haunted by the Black Abbot. There is too much talk (often in the form of isolated, stagy vignettes, & too little plot. Some of the smaller roles are juicier than the major roles. For example, the parts of Aunt Mary (played by Drusilla Wills) & the maid (played by an unknown actress who keeps wiping her nose) are well done.
