The Impersonator

The Impersonator is a 1961 low-budget black and white British second feature thriller film directed and co-written by Alfred Shaughnessy starring John Crawford, Jane Griffiths, Patricia Burke and John Salew. An American angle was incorporated to give transatlantic box office appeal.

Plot
In an effort to improve relations between a US air force base and the sleepy local English village nearby, airman Sergeant Jimmy Bradford organises a school trip to see the pantomime Mother Goose. Meanwhile a prowling killer is on the loose and after a night out with the victim, the finger of suspicion points at Bradford.

Cast

 * John Crawford as Sgt. Jimmy Bradford
 * Jane Griffiths as Ann Loring
 * Patricia Burke as Mrs Lloyd
 * John Salew as Harry Walker
 * John Dare as Tommy Lloyd
 * John Arnatt as Detective Superintendent Fletcher
 * Yvonne Ball as Principal boy in "Mother Goose"
 * Edmund Glover as Colonel
 * Frank Thornton as Police Sergeant

Production
The film was shot on a three-week schedule at Pinewood Studios and on location in Uxbridge. The pantomime sequences were filled at the Metropolitan Theatre, Edgware Road, London, which was demolished in 1963.

Critical reception
Monthly Film Bulletin said "This is a neatly plotted thriller, partly location-made and managing, within its modest ambitions and running time, to tell its story concisely and on very acceptable human terms. Dialogue, details of staging and playing, the amused look at a provincial pantomime, are all that much fresher and livelier than usual, though the direction itself has only a journeyman adequacy. The Impersonator is a good start from a new company – a second feature which has been thought about and worked on, and which shows it."

Writing in The Radio Times, David Parkinson gave the film two out of five stars, saying, "it's shoestring stuff, but still better than most British B-movies."

Britmovie called the film an "excellent British B-thriller produced by Bryanston on a budget of £23,000 that is a cut above the majority of second features."

It was one of 15 films selected by Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane in The British 'B' Film, as among the most meritorious of those made in Britain between World War II and 1970. They called it "exceptionally proficient" and noted that the critics Penelope Gilliatt and Dilys Powell had also praised it at the time of its release.