Import

High Treason (J. Arthur Rank; Pacemaker) wrings a good deal of bang-up drama from a spy plot in which enemy agents conspire to blow up England's strategic power plants. The picture is a solo effort of Britain's talented Director Roy Boulting, who, with his twin brother John, made the taut 1950 thriller Seven Days to Noon, about a demented atom scientist's attempt to destroy London.

Though played on a larger stage, High Treason is not quite so dynamic as Seven Days to Noon. The screenplay sometimes bogs down in low melodrama, and the pace lags now & then for wordy political digressions. But in Boulting's camera-wise direction the picture mostly crackles with pseudo-documentary excitement. The spectacular climax, as the saboteurs try to take over massive Battersea power station, was filmed at the actual locale among a futuristic welter of catwalks, dynamos and generating equipment. And Director Boulting gives the fanciful plot a realistic look with the odd British types who get tangled up in the titanic chase.

Chief of the conspirators is Anthony Nichols as an elegant, subversive M.P., while Liam Redmond plays a counterespionage commander with an Irish brogue and a taste for Etruscan art. Also on hand: Scotland Yard Supt. Folland (Andre Morell), who saved London from atomic devastation in Seven Days to Noon, here blandly helps rescue all of England from being overthrown by foreign agents.

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