He's seen it! One of the locals at this pub by the shores of Loch Ness rushes in one night to tell the regulars that he's just seen the fabled monster, but they treat him with jovial scepticism and order him a pint. Or they do until Professor Heggie (Seymour Hicks) storms in and thunders that the creature is real, and he will be the one to prove it. News of this reaches London when he holds a meeting with some esteemed scientists, all of whom hold up to ridicule his claims of a dinosaur living in the loch...
But one reporter senses a story, and suddenly the hunt is really afoot. Such was the case in real life when some stories about visitors to Loch Ness witnessing something strange in the waters became a countrywide, then worldwide, sensation, something for the silly season no doubt, but if it had not been for these tales then the likelihood of the monster's legend enduring into today would have been much reduced. Ever since there have been accounts of a large animal of some sort existing in the area, sometimes supported with photographs, and on occasion movies have been made too.
The Secret of the Loch was the first of these, a shameless cash-in on a current headline-grabber, and looked every inch the cheeky low budget opportunism that it was. Not that it appeared to take its story very seriously until the end, as for the most part this was a comedy with much laughing at the Scottish character, so plenty of alcoholic beverages were taken and the staunch belief in the importance of ancestry was held up to ridicule, nothing especially meanspirited, but leaving this as about a serious examination of the legend as one of those picture postcards depicting Nessie emerging from the loch sporting a tartan bunnet.
Still, it was amusing enough as far as that went, though our reporter hero Jimmy Anderson (Frederick Peisley) was about as bumptious as it was possible to be, ruthlessly pursuing his story even to the extent of breaking into the Professor's country house and introducing himself to his granddaughter Angela (Nancy O'Neil) as she lay in bed. She kept a commendably cool head at this intrusion, but given her grandfather is portrayed by Hicks as nothing short of a maniac, as if his faith in the monster has sent him cuckoo, it could have been she was used to morbidly eccentric behaviour.
As Heggie threatens murder on anyone who dares stand in his way - and you can believe he'd go through with it, too - the question of whether there really was anything down there in the murk becomes more pressing. After all, the filmmakers knew better than to string their audience along for just over an hour without any pay-off, and fiction using the behemoth since has almost always supplied some kind of prehistoric entity for sheer thrills if nothing else. So just as Doctor Who met Nessie in the seventies, and Ted Danson met him in the nineties, here was the screen's initial encounter with him, a sequence which reputedly terrified the infant Ken Russell, although if it has the same effect on you all these years later you must have a pet lizard phobia. Otherwise, this was basic, cheap and cheerful stuff, with only the credits of Hitchcock screenwriter Charles Bennett and epic director David Lean (here editing) to prompt much interest to historians; monster hunters amateur or professional may be amused, however. Music by Peter Mendoza.
