Opinion.

The Long Arm (British title) aka The Third Key (US title) is a classic police procedural in which no liberties are taken to cater to its audience. The movie adheres entirely to the spirit and form of the ideal police procedural. 

What is that spirit?

Well, it is difficut to achieve and it is very rarely dramatized; but if successfully done, the audience is viscerally and hugely caught up in, and hence thoroughly entertained by, the difficult, challenging  creation of a pure (and very human) drama. In sum, the audience, just as initially befuddled by the crime as is law enforcement, fully participates in the sleuthing and eventual solution along with the police and detectives.

When you think about it, the task of the police in a procedural is to begin with a whole world of possible motives, myriad crime mechanics (e.g.,methods of murder) and, in general, a severe lack of clues. The chief exercise in the sleuthing, using reason and imagination, is the ultimate discovery of the criminals but from a beginning point of  a pure mystery and what almost seems like entirely a puzzle, unravelled by a very clever boiling down of the crime(s) until the methodology of the criminals is established and the limitations of their crime(s), the compromises they had to make, are indisputable: that is, there is no other way they could have committed the crime.

From the very beginning, and without any script-writing or directorial “cheating” to aid the viewer–no forewarning, no sly metaphors which from the outset and with subtlety contain the solution to the case (see my review in the present blog of The Rockford Files under “Other Culture” for this compositional “sin” by the great crime novelist, Raymond Chandler), no telltale evil facial expressions, no early cutaways to reveal culprits, no hotels or mansions or resorts peopled by several usually eccentric characters among whom, it is understood, the guilty one(s) must be present and it is just a matter of isolating the crook(s)–sleuthing aids are not provided.

Enter The Third Key. And especially enter the fine British Actor, Jack Hawkins. It’s a J. Arthur Rank movie–the man with the muscular torso pounds the gong. After that, Hawkins, prominent as a detective, and surrounded by a good crew, slowly and rationally and cleverly (i.e., with a talent for calm distinctions in the face of multiple possible causes of crimes), solves the crime of several burglaries. He starts with almost nothing. In fact, he is the victim of a very clever misdirection at the start.

However, I’ll not be a spoiler. 

But I will say this: The police procedural and crime fiction in general are really about Making Sense of Things. The genres themselves are popular because they answer a basic human need as we come into this mysterious world knowing less about it than we’d have hoped. Mystery is All Around Us, an All-Around Surround, every day. Obviously movies, books and other art-forms often dramatize this ultimately impossible challenge.

But if you want a remarkably pure expression of this constant human drama, watch The Third Key. Hawkins and colleages proceed from a puzzling string of burglaries. The trick is to boil down How The Burglers Did It. Greed is, of course, the classic motive. But you wouldn’t have recognized the unlikely culprits in a crowd. Yet they are exceedingly clever, as some humans are wont to be. Hawkins visits companies that make safes, visits companies which use the safes, discovers that there are varying amounts of money in various safes at various times, deduces how lucrative thievery choices are made, and proceeds from there.

You can’t see the movie in theaters but you can see it on your computer. Here’s the link: https://ok.ru/video/2334251223579