A thoroughly engrossing and highly plausible entertainment -- and an unusually trenchant examination of the psychology of bigotry.

Unfortunately, this film does not hold good on any level, and is flatly written and directed into the bargain. The melodrama has little drive other than the monotonous ending of sequence after sequence on a "punch line."

This is Important Cinema with Socially Relevant Themes and, while surely daring in its day, comes off as insufferably patronizing and sanctimonious at times.

When the eponymous girl is found murdered, it falls to "Supt. Hazard" (Nigel Patrick) and his sidekick "Learoyd" (Michael Craig) to get to the bottom of things. There seems a genuine sense of shock amongst her friends, her landlady and her fiancée "David" (Paul Massie) and his family but when her brother, a doctor, arrives the whole investigation takes on an whole new complexion. What now ensues in a rather unsophisticated police drama, admittedly, but the social and racial aspects of life in London in the late 1950s are writ large - a poignant and frankly rather shameful indictment of attitudes amongst people of various social classes who allow bigotry to remain an accepted part of day-to-day life - even amongst those looking into the crime. Patrick is solid here, as is the victim's would-be father-in-law Bernard Miles ("Ted") and though the denouement has shades of Agatha Christie to it, it's still quite a well paced, compelling and uncomfortable, watch.