Portrait of Alison 1955

A car plunges over a cliff in Italy, taking the lives of the newsman Lewis Forrester and the actress Alison Ford, [Terry Moore]. In London, Tim Forrester, [Robert Beatty], is an artist focused on a painting of his favorite model, Jill Stewart, [Josephine Griffin], for a beer advertisement. Jill and Tim have a shared past and a tension about commitment: she is now seeing Henry Carmichael, [Allan Cuthbertson], who has asked her to marry him, yet she is unable to resist a passionate moment with Tim just as a police inspector arrives. The visitor, Inspector Colby, [Geoffrey Keen], adds another layer of scrutiny to their tangled lives.

Tim then receives a startling commission from a Mr Smith, [Henry Oscar], to paint Smith’s dead daughter—Alison—for whom he is given a photo to work from and a striking pink dress to include in the portrait. Jill, spotting the dress and the portrait, admires both and a few days later she meets her fiancé for lunch but forgets a box she was meant to deliver. The unsettling sequence intensifies when Jill is found dead in Tim’s flat, still wearing the pink dress. The face in the portrait has been erased, and the photo on which it was based has vanished. The police arrive to inspect the evidence, and the box they open contains an empty bottle of Chianti labeled with a British company, “Nightingale & Son”—a firm that does not exist. The Chianti bottle even appears sketched in the corner of a Rome postcard Tim received from Lewis, linking the tragedy to the broader mystery. Tim quickly becomes a prime suspect in the murder.

As the investigation unfolds, it becomes clear that Alison is not dead. She reappears in London to explain the car crash: the woman killed was not her, and Lewis had hinted he was onto an international diamond-smuggling ring that involved her father. Alison suspects Lewis planned the accident to silence a witness and believes her own father may not have known the details of the plot. Tim invites the police to his flat to verify that Alison is alive, but she vanishes again. She eventually goes to see her father in a hotel to press him to reveal the truth about the diamond-smuggling operation, yet he is terrified and contemplates fleeing the country. Alison phones Tim to bring him up to date, adding another layer of urgency to an already tense affair.

As the web of intrigue tightens, a series of enigmatic questions surface, accompanied by two more murders and a suicide. It emerges that no fewer than four of the principal characters are part of the diamond-thieves’ ring, and that an independent blackmailer is operating behind the scenes, complicating every motive and alibi. The tension escalates toward a climactic confrontation in which loyalties blur and the truth becomes a moving target, even as the characters attempt to salvage something resembling trust from a landscape of betrayal.

In the final strokes, after arrests are made, Tim and Alison find a moment of quiet amid the chaos. He asks whether she can stay while he completes her portrait, and she asks how long that will take. He answers, with a vow that sounds almost inevitable, “All my life,” to which she replies, “That’s fine.”

“All my life”

“That’s fine”