Vernon Sewell was an often inventive director of British B-movies and some time collaborator with the great Michael Powell. One of his odd peculiarities was an obsession with an obscure French theatrical thriller, L’Angoisse by Pierre Mills and Celia de Vilyars the basics of which he used no fewer than four times, starting in 1934 with the short The Medium. Latin Quarter (released in the States as Frenzy) came next, and the plot was recycled again for Ghost Ship (1952) and House of Mystery (1961) with Latin Quarter the only one of the quartet to retain the French setting, Paris in the Latin Quarter (“the Mecca of artists of all nationalities”) in 1893 to be precise.

According to the BFI’s Screenonline, Sewell “revealed ingenuity in the use of foreground models to achieve special effects” and there’s a superb example of this in Latin Quarter‘s opening shot. We pan across an intricately detailed recreation of the Paris rooftops, the camera swooping down into the bustling streets and into an artist’s billet where an organ appears to be playing itself. It’s a breathtaking, virtuosos piece of camerawork of the sort that that one might not expect to find in a British film (or any other film come to that) of the period. What follows is a brooding tale of obsession, madness, betrayal, and guilt with hints of the supernatural.

The billet formerly belonged to sculptor Anton Minetti (Beresford Egan) but has recently been taken over by his rival Charles Garrie (Derrick De Marney) who mysteriously insists that nothing about the lodgings be changed. Landlady Maria (Lily Kann) is so terrified by the ghostly sounds of the organ playing at all hours that she can barely bring herself to enter the rooms and Garrie is soon experiencing odd events, like lamps that turn themselves on an off every night at 11. Minetti goes insane and dies not long after his wife Christine (Joan Greenwood) disappeared and the police, led by the Préfet de Police (Valentine Dyall) are baffled enough to call upon the services of “France’s most famous crimologist” Dr Ivan Krasner (Frederick Valk) for help. In flashbacks we learn that Christina was a promising ballet dancer until diagnosed with a heart condition and eventually married Minetti who had hired her as a model. but at her wedding she met Garrie and the two fell instantly in love, beginning an illicit affair. She vanished o the night that they’d planned to run away together and Krasner proposes that they stag a séance with famous spirit medium Mme. Cordova (Sybille Binder) to try to locate her. And it turns out that Christine is far closer to hand than anyone expected…

Having set out his stall with that opening shot, Sewell proceeds to make a beautifully designed and shot film that drips in atmosphere. The sets by R. Holmes Paul are packed with period detail, but Sewell’s most valuable ally is the extraordinary cinematographer Günther Krampf, an Austrian émigré who had worked in Germany on the likes of Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), Orlacs Hände (1924), Der Student von Prag (1926), Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), Alraune (1929) and many others. He’d arrived in Britain in 1931 where he stamped his unique mark on The Ghoul (1933), The Tunnel (1935) and The Night Has Eyes (1942) before joining Sewell at Elstree where he leant Latin Quarter an almost noir-ish feel. His lighting during the climactic séance is particularly eerie.

It’s not hard, perhaps, to work out the central mystery but Sewell’s screenplay is commendably streamlined, the mystery unfolding largely in flashbacks that keeps the riddle of Christine’s fate bubbling along quite nicely until the final act. None of this would have worked without a first rate cast and Sewell gets terrific performances from de Marney, Greenwood and particularly Egan who becomes increasingly unhinged as the film goes along.

Latin Quarter was rather overshadowed by its near contemporary, Ealing’s classic anthology film Dead of Night which opened a week before Sewell’s film. The quality of some of Sewell’s later genre work – The Blood Beast Terror (1968), Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), Burke & Hare (1971) – could give one cause to dismiss him as something of a hack but his earlier work suggests a far more talented director than that. Latin Quarter is a particularly impressive film, deserving of more attention than it often gets. There are moments where one might wonder quite why we need to be seeing all this – the ballet school scene in particular adds little to the story and could have been considerable pruned – but overall, Sewell hits just the right note of mystery and the macabre, the film’s horror moments coming not only in the creepy séance scene but in a startling moment when a tall masked figure dressed as a medieval executioner stares silently at Garrie and Christina at a lavish Right Bank masquerade ball.