“A man is released from jail after serving 12 years for a murder he didn’t commit. Determined to seek revenge on those responsible for his imprisonment, he at first shuts himself away in a deserted barge on the Thames Estuary where he is kept under police surveillance and hounded by pressmen after a story. Only a pathetic refugee girl is slowly able to get through to him.”

Wiki:

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: “The story of The Long Memory is one of improbable if ingenious contrivance; one might have expected a fast and fairly exciting melodrama to have been made from it. The director, however, has chosen a slow, slightly portentous and fairly inflexible style with which to frame his events; he has spot-lighted characters and motivations and, by doing so, exposed them. For the truth is that the people are superficially and unconvincingly drawn, and further handicapped by some undistinguished acting. The attempt at a Quai des Brumes (1938) atmosphere barge setting, the outcasts’ shack, the love affair of the embittered man and the pathetic refugee – appears strained and unreal. Some good small-part acting (by Vida Hope, Thora Hird, Geoffrey Keen and Harold Lang) and the excellent location work in and around Gravesend are not enough to disguise a confected intrigue among wooden characters. There are obviously intelligent talents at work, but they are misapplied.”^[13]

Screenonline wrote, “visually it is an extraordinary film, which makes exciting use of the desolate landscape around the Thames estuary” and which is “uncompromising in its treatment of human suffering and injustice.”^[14]