Cinema: True to Form

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The Model Murder Case. In England, a tidy little homicide nearly always turns out for the best. A model call girl is felled by an assassin's bullet. Suspicion naturally falls on the TV star next door. But one clue leads to another, and soon Chief Inspector Ian Hendry is up to his large firm chin in a gallery of smooth British character types. If the telly favorite didn't kill the girl, who did? The waterfront drifter she dated? Her neurasthenic mother? The sculptor? The passée opera diva? Or the boy friend's brother's jealous wife?

Though true to formula, this stout mystery thriller efficiently hooks an audience and holds it. Revelations pile up, marking a trail of drugs, violence and death from posh London digs to homosexual dives to seedy Thames-side riverboats. Actor Hendry follows the spoor without woman chasing or wine tasting, as if James Bond had never been invented. Tough, realistic, dryly humorous, he behaves precisely like a harassed civil servant who can't find time to get to bed with his own wife, much less anyone else's. His performance ends, inevitably, with the declaration: "Everything seems to fit." And everything does. Just like the daily crossword.