Alastair Sim had that rare natural faculty, innately switching from pleasant English gentleman to scheming bastard, all with the quintessential shit eating grin. The Green Man, a cornerstone of Sim’s acting career, finds him playing a semi-retired assassin with an international reputation of bumping off third rate dictators. In what appears to be one of his last jobs, Hawkins (Sim) comes undone by the tomfooleries of vacuum cleaner salesman George Cole long before he morphed into Arthur Daley in Minder.
Robert Day’s richly dark comedy belongs alongside works like The Ladykillers; sinister, malevolent and nonsensical, that revels in the banal sexual and class repressions that fester serendipitously in post war British suburbia. The extended sequence in the two semis is deftly handled by Day, a comedy of errors in which dead bodies, mistaken identity and blood merge into a brilliant pastiche. A triumph through and through.
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