Rushing Roulette

Signpost to Murder, by contrast, has a neat surprise ending, though nothing that happens beforehand makes a solution seem urgent.

The conflict churns, at times quite literally, around an old English water mill with its paddle wheel shlupping and sloshing through Joanne Woodward's living room. Though the mill looks slickly renovated, the plot remains distressed antique: a woman whose husband is away is trapped by an escaped madman. Joanne is the sort of girl who prances around home modeling bathing suits or floppy hats, but her mood changes when the wheel starts scooping up gentlemen, living and dead.

First comes the lunatic (Stuart Whitman) who insists he is sane, yet cannot recall much about the night his wife was found with her throat slit. Joanne finds Whitman's story irresistible somehow, perhaps because her own marriage has been--well, difficult. She no sooner gives herself to her captor than fresh revelations come splashing to the surface.

Unfortunately, all of Murder's devices prove to be just about as hopelessly primitive as that. The dialogue offers a redoubtable challenge to actors required to speak it with straight faces. They get scant help from Director George Englund, who apparently felt stymied by a shocker in which the only new gimmick is the discovery of the wheel.

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