[3] The screenplay was by Hamer and Frank Harvey based on the 1951 novel The Long Memory by Howard Clewes.

A broken oil lamp starts a fire, attracting the attention of the authorities, and Philip is fished out of the water.

When Fay realises Boyd is not coming, she attempts suicide by trying to jump in front of an oncoming Waterloo & City line train, but is stopped by other people on the platform.

It is time for Boyd to meet Fay at London Waterloo railway station, but he pursues Philip and shoots him in the arm.

[1] Frank Godwin, assistant to Earl St John, called it "a very good but rather downbeat film."

At the premiere Godwin recalled St John "sunk lower and lower in his seat and, at the end, he slowly eased himself up, put his arm around the producer Hugh Stewart's shoulder and said: 'Well, kid, I guess we've gotta sell this film on its merits'.

"[7] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "The story of The Long Memory is one of improbable if ingenious contrivance; one might have expected a fast and fairly exciting melodrama to have been made from it.

The director, however, has chosen a slow, slightly portentous and fairly inflexible style with which to frame his events; he has spot-lighted characters and motivations and, by doing so, exposed them.

The attempt at a Quai des Brumes (1938) atmosphere barge setting, the outcasts' shack, the love affair of the embittered man and the pathetic refugee – appears strained and unreal.

Some good small-part acting (by Vida Hope, Thora Hird, Geoffrey Keen and Harold Lang) and the excellent location work in and around Gravesend are not enough to disguise a confected intrigue among wooden characters.

Here he cleverly captures the murky side of life in London's marshlands, but he is beaten from the start by the utterly predictable wrong man story.