"The most unremittingly grim of all the British noirs (and also from 1947), Daybreak was perhaps the only one of the British group which did not spring (reasonably) logically from the contemporary postwar scene. It probably would not have been made at all if someone hadn't had the idea of following up the Compton Bennett-Ann Todd smash The Seventh Veil with a film that was Art with a capital 'A'. In that sense Daybreak was something of a misfire. Influenced by the prewar French school, it goes overboard with a bizarre story in which barber Eric Portman is also the public hangman, and uses his office to get revenge on his wife's lover. The film immediately ran afoul of the British censors who refused its release until it was partially reshot, although the one change didn't do much to lighten its load of gloom, despair and death. The late Maxwell Reed, as the lecherous seducer, fully lives up to the image depicted by Joan Collins in her autobiography! (He was her first husband--the one who tried to sell her off to an Arabian millionaire!)" William K. Everson