I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This film really is as good as everybody says. Nigel Patrick makes an excellent principled investigator. His younger sidekick is the one who casually lets fall a succession of racist myths. A girl is found stabbed on Hampstead Heath - it turns out she is a music student with a serious, striving boyfriend. But the cops are surprised by the red taffeta petticoat she wears under her sober "tweed" skirt. (It's a brown, with sunray pleats.) When her brother turns up, they discover that she is "coloured", and has been passing for white. Much of the investigation focuses on the boyfriend's family, who are aspirant, respectable working class. His dad is a sign painter played by the great Bernard Miles. One of the film's many virtues is that we SEE him painting a sign, and see his workshop at the back of the house in a former stable block. The family stand together and assert that they accepted Sapphire, background, pregnancy and all.Londoners love films set in our city decades ago. Oh, look, I remember those Victorian shops, those buses! There are many excellent bit players, including a couple of landladies – one who says "I run a WHITE house" while smiling crookedly. Another wears a Cairngorm brooch and says she would have thrown Sapphire out if she'd "known". The past wasn't all that cosy. Sapphire's brother says he'll stay at a certain hotel which will "take us".The film is in colour, all the better to show off the garish underwear. There is a wonderful visit to Babette's lingerie shop in Shaftesbury Avenue. The detectives hold up a bright pink nylon negligee with some disgust. Stereotypes fly - a girl may look white, but if she has black ancestry she can't resist the rhythm of the bongos. There are many black characters - more than in most TV dramas or films of today, and they all impress. One is a dandy with a bishop for a father. There are some dubious types hanging out in an empty house. A dimwitted suspect goes on the run through the mean streets and the film reaches another level. He's beaten up by some "teddy boys" and takes refuge in a newspaper shop run by a kindly (white) old couple.It's about this point the watcher realises that this is no standard detective story. The acting is superlative, especially from the boyfriend's family - his worried mother, and fraught sister, whose husband is permanently "at sea".Exteriors are drab because that's how they were. But interiors are carefully painted to look as dreary as possible - perhaps to show up snappy suits and orange lipstick. But were walls and furniture really painted in shades of brown or grey? There's a lovely scene early on where Sapphire's student friends discuss her in Foscari's coffee bar. I wish we'd seen more of them.

So far during this year's Black History Month, I've been reviewing American films. What I'm commenting on now took place and was filmed in Britain. In this one, a Sapphire Robbins (Yvonne Buckingham) is found dead at Hampstead Heath. Superintendent Robert Hazard (Nigel Patrick) and partner Inspector Phil Learoyd (Michael Craig) investigate who done it. Her boyfriend David Harris (Paul Massie) and brother, a Dr. Robbins (Earl Cameron) are also interested though the former has his own secrets to hide along with his sister Mildred (Yvonne Mitchell) and possibly their parents (Bernard Miles and Olga Lindo). By the way, since the doctor has dark skin and his late sister is light, there's also a racial aspect involved...When I first watched this on American Movie Classics back in the mid '80s (by the way, this was the first I actually watched on that channel), it was intriguing enough for me that I would have loved to have seen it again much sooner than just now on YouTube if I had the chance. Now that I indeed have, it's even more compelling as both a mystery and pretty intense drama on the social tensions that I'm sure were very prevalent during that time in England. Especially considering the way characters of both races reveal their prejudices in both subtle and blatant ways. And besides Cameron, other people of color worth noting that appeared here include Gordon Heath as Paul Slade, Harry Gaird as Johnnie Fiddle (who is identified among other Johnnys at a bar), Orlando Martins as a barman, and Robert Adams as Horace Big Cigar. Really, this was a fine British drama that greatly tackled the way prejudices of most kinds were displayed there. P.S. I didn't know about the stereotype of cops having big feet there. Sure beats the one about donuts here!

I first saw the movie Sapphire on the Million Dollar Movie one night and I fell in love with it. I"m one for a good mystery movie and this is the one. From start to finish and when the movie did end I wanted more. The movie's ending will surprise you. The cast was excellent and actors Nigel Patrick Earl Cameron and Yvonne Mitchell were just great. I finally purchased this movie from one of those hard to find videos company on VHS. This movie needs to be released on DVD!!!! The racism in Sapphire was very brutal and honest. Here you had the tragic mulatto who is murdered I think of Imitation of Life where Susan Kohner's Sarah Jane is passing for white to the point she gets beaten up by her secret white lover, she was lucky!!!!!!!

When a young woman's body is discovered on London's Hampstead Heath, the ensuing investigation quickly focuses on racial bigotry and hatred in 1950s Britain, exposing the prejudice amongst those under investigation AND those investigating.Like so many other films from the 1940s and 1950s, Sapphire is yet another piece of groundbreaking British cinema now long forgotten. A little clunky and overly reliant on stereotyping by today's standards, but still a fascinating exploration of the fears and struggles inherent in a newly mixed-race society. Dearden has brought together an interesting cast here, cleverly giving matinée idol Craig a fairly unsympathetic role as a racist police officer, and being superbly served by Mitchell - her final scene is at once both compelling and distressing. Too many British cinema actors of the 40's and 50's have now been forgotten, and Mitchell is a prime example of why individual and collective reappraisals and retrospectives are long overdue.Interesting companion piece to 1961's Flame In The Streets, then, and definitely worth catching if you can.