80,000 Suspects

80,000 Suspects is a 1963 British drama film directed and written by Val Guest and starring Claire Bloom, Richard Johnson, Yolande Donlan and Cyril Cusack.

[3] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "A veneer of authenticity (Bath locations, queues for vaccination, hospital staff eternally hopping in and out of decontamination units) is effectively smothered by the collection of appallingly stock characters and situations.

Richard Johnson and Claire Bloom mouth all those married-couple platitudes, about taking a long look at their marriage and being brought together by shared experiences as if they had only just been thought of; Yolande Donlan, as an unsatisfied wife given to drink and free love, oozes little girl charm and ends up, like Mrs. Danvers, in flames in Ye OId Dark House; Michael Goodliffe, as her hangdog husband, suffers expressionlessly; and Cyril Cusack, as the wryly humorous Catholic priest, nobly kisses a Protestant smallpox patient on the brow.

"[5] Sight and Sound wrote: "Guest does his best to give both narrative threads equal weight, which proves engrossing up to a point, but the film flags appreciably when the outbreak element peaks too early; and the characterisation on the domestic front never quite delineates the couple's marital malaise with enough insight to make it something special.

Still, as in Jigsaw [1962], there's a definite sense that old moral certainties have become much more flexible – something Cyril Cusack's presence as a worldly priest makes clear – and Johnson, never the most nimble of performers, puts in a decent shift as the harassed medic realising that he's lost the ability to feel anything much at all.