The Hour of 13 *** (1952, Peter Lawford, Dawn Addams, Roland Culver, Derek Bond, Leslie Dwyer) – Classic Movie Review 13,556

Someone’s killing London coppers. Someone’s stealing gems. Scotland Yard think it’s the same man. The 1952 British crime mystery film The Hour of 13 stars Peter Lawford, Dawn Addams, Roland Culver, Derek Bond and Leslie Dwyer.

Director Harold French’s 1952 MGM British crime mystery romance film The Hour of 13 [The Hour of Thirteen] is based on Philip MacDonald’s 1933 novel X vs Rex, and features Peter Lawford, Dawn Addams, Roland Culver, Derek Bond, Leslie Dwyer, Michael Hordern, Colin Gordon, and Michael Goodliffe.

MGM wants to have it all ways: it cannily mixes a gentleman master jewel thief story with a serial killer story, and stirs in a romantic drama too. The cake and eat it too idea works as a rather tasty mix. Darker would be better, but this fairly light-hearted approach to multiple murder and theft is more MGM’s thing. And they know how to pull it off, with a handsome, costly looking production craftsmanly designed by art director Alfred Junge, and striking, moody black and white Victorian noir photography by Guy Green. John Addison’s overwrought score is an entertainment in itself.

At heart, it’s really only one of the many, many Brit crime second features of the era (though that would be a good thing), but given an A-movie budget. Ironically, it’s weirdly kind of disappointing that the production looks so good. There are just too many big impressive sets for this kind of thing.

Two British starlets then making out in America, Peter Lawford and Dawn Addams, fly back for MGM’s fairly humble but amusing and amiable remake of 1934’s The Mystery of Mr X (originally starring Robert Montgomery and Elizabeth Allan) about a series of fatal cop stabbings in Victorian London by a serial killer known as The Terror (Richard Shaw) who is making a 13-course meal of murdering policemen. Peter Lawford plays the jewel thief looking for the killer, while stealing a priceless emerald from the neck of Mrs Chumley Orr ( Heather Thatcher) at a dinner dance, with the help of crooks Ernie Perker and MacStreet (Leslie Dwyer and Colin Gordon).

It’s gaslit 1890, London, and gentleman thief Nicholas Revel (Peter Lawford) unwittingly becomes Scotland Yard’s chief suspect, so he must use all his wits to prove he’s not the killer and evade getting caught for the jewel robbery he has just committed near the scene of the latest one of the killings. He takes the emerald off its chain, chucks the chain out of the window, it lands hanging from a shrub exactly where a passing cooper is murdered, and Revel is forced to jump out of the window, too, landing on the same spot!

Revel is clever, involving police boss Sir Herbert Frensham’s daughter Jane (Dawn Addams) in his plot. But Inspector Connor (Roland Culver) from Scotland Yard is onto him. He’s got his number okay. He may think he has his man, but can he actually arrest him either for the killings or the jewel theft?

The Hour of Thirteen is smooth and entertaining, and made with enough skill to cover the numerous plot holes and freshen up the old material, with pleasant performances, especially by the character actors, plenty of 1890 London atmosphere, and bright, brisk handling. Peter Lawford is a young smoothie, not brilliant but okay, Dawn Addams is better, most alluring, while Derek Bond is as stiff as a board in an admittedly boring, unsympathetic part as the heroine’s fiance, leaving the field wide open for Roland Culver to run away with the film as the canny copper from Scotland Yard and also Leslie Dwyer as Lawford’s little helper, a cockney cabbie and crook of course. Michael Hordern has a pretty good time too as Addams’s good-natured police commissioner father Sir Herbert Frensham, and Colin Gordon’s shifty and creepy enough as the crooked insurance value in the league with Lawford.

The are some effective twists and turns, a few surprises, a decent finale in a darkly-lit warehouse, and a surprise ending in the story to make it a pleasantly diverting 79 minutes. But, given that it’s a serial killer story, where’s the real noir? It’s all too gentlemanly by far, as the Peter Lawford star casting suggests.

The new screenplay written by Leon Gordon and Howard Emmett Rogers is heavily dependent on the one for 1934’s The Mystery of Mr X, making pointless changes like turning Mr X in Mr T, The Terror, so his killings are staged in a T pattern on the map, instead of an X pattern, and changing the number of intended killings to 13 to justify the new title. It also notably changes the story’s setting from contemporary 1934 London to the Victorian era, a period setting which works very nicely. Revel eventually sends the emerald to the police by post in Mr X but risks holding onto it in Hour of 13. The new surprise ending is a surprise, granted, but the old ending is so much more satisfying, and obviously the right one for the story. Howard Emmett Rogers wrote the screenplay for The Mystery of Mr X, so it’s not surprising the films are so similar, especially the dialogue and characters, even if so many details are changed.

One big success of the new screenplay is changing the theft of the valuable emerald from a quick safe job to a major sequence at the home of Mrs Chumley Orr (Heather Thatcher) and Mr Chumley Orr (Campbell Cotts), with Revel nabbing the jewel and its chain from the lady’s neck after causing a diversion. However, this gets the writers into problems in the scene’s wake when Revel interrupts the latest cop killing after fleeing out of a window. The original is simply shorter, sharper and cleaner.

Cheekily, even outrageously, they actually reuse the excellent footage of the first cop killing at the start of the film from The Mystery of Mr X, and much of the action footage in the darkly-lit warehouse at the film’s eqaully excellent climax also is archive footage from The Mystery of Mr X.

The cast are Peter Lawford as Nicholas Revel, Dawn Addams as Jane Frensham, Roland Culver as Connor, Derek Bond as Sir Christopher Lenhurst, Leslie Dwyer as Ernie Perker, Michael Hordern as Sir Herbert Frensham, Colin Gordon as MacStreet, Heather Thatcher as Mrs. Chumley Orr, Fabia Drake as Lady Elmbridge, Campbell Cotts as Mr Chumley Orr, Michael Goodliffe as Anderson, Peter Copely as Cummings, Jack McNaughton as Ford, Moultrie Kelsall as Magistrate of Court, Sam Kydd as Reporter, and Richard Shaw (the latter too incredibly briefly).

It was shot at MGM’s Elstree Studios, though there is also some London location shooting, including in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park and at Shad Thames, Southwark. 

The film failed at the box office, costing $873,000 and earning $756,000, and MGM lost $424,000.

The Hour of 13 is directed by Harold French, runs 80 minutes, is made by MGM-British, is released by MGM, is written by Leon Gordon and Howard Emmett Rogers, is shot in black and white by Guy Green, is produced by Hayes Goetz, and is scored by John Addison.

Dawn Addams (21 September 1930 – 7 May 1985) 1950, signed a seven-year contract with MGM in 1950. She married Don Vittorio Emanuele Massimo, Prince of Roccasecca, in 1954 and became a princess.

Peter Lawford 7 September 1923 – 24 December 1984) was signed to a long-term contract to MGM in 1943 but the studio let him go in 1953.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,556

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