Sidney Gilliat's Green for Danger was the most inventive murder mystery to come out of England in the eight years since Alfred Hitchcock left the country -- and in a sense, it's no surprise that this would be the case as it was co-written, produced, and directed by the team of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, the two authors of the screenplay for Hitchcock's last great English thriller, The Lady Vanishes. Based on Christianna Brand's novel, the 1946 movie is a fascinating variation on that venerable English creation, the drawing room thriller -- in this case, the drawing room is replaced by a hospital operating theater, and instead of family members, the suspects are comprised of the surgical team, doctors and surgeons (two separate professional classes in England), and the nurses with whom they may (or may not) be involved. The movie featured one of the niftiest murders seen in a movie in years: the victim is killed on an operating table, in front of two doctors and a team of nurses who are unable to discern what has happened or why. World War II and Germany's V-1 bombings of England also figure into the plot and add to the atmosphere of uncertainty and suspense surrounding the events taking place in the hospital.
Green for Danger also has an extremely important place in the history of British film production, as it was the first feature film after the war to be shot at the reopened Pinewood Studios, which was an important symbol of the industry's return to peacetime -- indeed, a close look at the credits shows this as the first film for members of a new generation (or, perhaps, a newly promoted generation would be a better way of putting it) of production designers (Peter Proud), cinematographers (Wilkie Cooper), etc., their careers newly restarted and on track to do major films into the 1960s and beyond. The movie also introduced Alastair Sim to international audiences as a serious leading actor, and set the stage for the stardom that he would later achieve in Scrooge, and again in the hands of Launder and Gilliat in The Belles of St. Trinian's. Additionally, the movie's casting, plotting, and execution served as a prime example of how British studios were going to compete with their higher-budgeted American rivals in the years after the war: by making movies that were cleverer and more offbeat than anything coming out of America.