'Tread Softly' (1952) – David McDonald.

A musical is being rehearsed, and the blonde-haired diva (Frances Day) finally storms off in a huff, they subsequently lose the venue, and expressing the pluckiest 'the show must go on' tradition, the beleaguered theatrical company somewhat anxiously move the entire production to a phantasmagorically spooky, long-abandoned, darkly storied, creepily cob-webbed theatre wherein a dastardly murder had been vilely perpetrated many years earlier! Capable Director David McDonald's intriguingly odd, frequently bizarre, far from neatly coalesced admixture of rumbustious, toe-tapping musical, and ominous, shadow-soaked, Edgar Wallace-style haunted house murder mystery soon becomes a wickedly eccentric, terror-tinged vintage thriller whose narrative inconsistencies ultimately prove to be strangely endearing! While 'Tread Softly' stamps rather cumbrously over B-Thriller convention, this pleasingly noisome affair isn't without some interest to avid fans of macabre, but ever so slightly off-key 50s-era British murder mysteries! The standard of acting is generally robust across the well-trodden boards, with the ever reliable leading man John Bentley, and the luminously beautiful, splendidly vivacious Patricia Dainton making for an engagingly appealing couple now dangerously enmeshed within the murderous coils of some ever encroaching, life-threatening campaign of terror!