Rank and File - A British Cinema Blog

Though the last post dates from three years ago, Rank and File - A British Cinema Blog is a welcome recent discovery.

Written by an anonymous father and daughter team, it deals in the sort of almost good British films that the channel Talking Pictures TV has made it easier to watch in recent years.

There are stills, notes on the cast and on costumes that crop up again in other films.

The still above, borrowed from Rank and File, shows the tragic Joan Dowling in Murder Without Crime from 1950::

She was perhaps best known for her role as the tomboy Clarry in the 1947 Ealing Studios production Hue and Cry, a story set among the rubble and buildings of post-war London about a group of school children who discover that crooks have been sending coded messages about forthcoming jobs to their gang using the pages of a children's comic. In 1951 she married Harry Fowler, another actor from the cast of Hue and Cry.

Joan Dowling took her own life at the ago of 26.