Walk a Tightrope opened in Britain in August 1963. American audiences didn’t get it until later, and when they did, they got less of it. Paramount removed the opening scene and shortened the picture to 69 minutes, and, disappointingly, Kino’s Blu-ray debut uses that American cut without letting viewers see what was cut.

Robert L. Lippert’s Associated Producers backed the production, with Lippert largely supplying the American names. Jack Parsons produced alongside Neil McCallum, who also contributed to the screenplay without credit and appears as counsel during the courtroom scenes. Mann Rubin, a veteran of live television and Studio One, received the writing credit, with Frank Nesbitt directing.

Running just over an hour, the premise wastes no time lurching out of the gate. Carl Lutcher (Dan Duryea, Scarlet Street), an American in London, makes a startling claim: a woman (Patricia Owens, The Fly) hired him to murder her husband (Terence Cooper). There’s an immediate problem with the story. The husband is a wealthy businessman she appears to adore. Lutcher, meanwhile, looks and sounds exactly like the sort of man you wouldn’t trust with your wallet, much less a murder accusation. Suddenly everyone has to decide whether he’s lying, she’s lying or something even stranger is going on.

Casting Duryea is half the movie’s trick. For two decades he had been one of film noir’s most dependable heels, stretching back to Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window in 1944. Walk a Tightrope uses all that baggage against the audience. Lutcher barely has to open his mouth before instinct tells us not to believe him. Owens gets the more difficult assignment. She has to keep enough uncertainty around her character that Lutcher’s accusation can’t simply be dismissed, and she manages to hold onto that question without playing the obvious femme fatale.

Rubin’s television background is easy to spot. This is a movie built on accusations, conversations and people watching one another for the wrong reaction rather than chases or shootouts. Basil Emmott gives the film some welcome texture whenever it escapes the studio, shooting around Westbourne Grove, Strand on the Green and the London Apprentice pub in Isleworth. Those real London locations do more for the atmosphere than the anonymous interiors, where Nesbitt’s direction can become awfully plain.

The plot also asks for a little generosity as it winds toward the finish, and a few holes become harder to ignore once everything is explained. Still, at barely more than an hour, Walk a Tightrope doesn’t hang around long enough to wear out its premise. For Duryea fans, that gives the movie extra value. After a career spent lying, scheming and sweating his way through noirs from Lang to Criss Cross and beyond, his final entry in the genre has finally made its way to U.S. home video.