I first became aware of Pat Jackson's work through one of his later and lesserknown films: the suspense thriller Don't Talk to Strange Men (1962), a sharply observed little film shot on a shoestring budget, centering on a serial killer in a small British country village who selects his victims by ringing an isolated phone booth near a bus stop and waiting to see who answers. When Jean Painter (Christina Gregg) picks up the phone late one afternoon, the anonymous caller on the other end of the line begins to chat her up in soothing, seductive tones. Lulled into a false sense of security, Jean agrees to meet him later at an isolated rendezvous. Only the timely intervention of Jean's much younger, but far more perceptive, sister, Ann (Janina Faye), saves Jean from a violent death. Interestingly, we never see the killer, who is photographed only from the back, blocking out much of the frame in each scene in which he appears; all that identifies him is his voice, which seems unnervingly calm and composed.

Originally released on the bottom half of a double bill with Tony Richardson's classic The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Don't Talk to Strange Men is a deft example of low-budget filmmaking at its most effective and typical of much of the work that Pat Jackson did in the 1960s – which also included a number of episodes of the visionary television series The Prisoner (Jackson was the person who “discovered” Prisoner star Patrick McGoohan and directed the actor's first screen test), as well as episodes of The Saint, Danger Man (aka Secret Agent in the United States), Man in a Suitcase and other hourlong television dramas. But Jackson's career goes back to the mid-1930s. Born on 26 March 1916, Jackson was just turning twenty when he started off as an assistant on Harry Watt and Basil Wright's classic documentary Night Mail (1936) and later Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt's London Can Take It (1940), a stirring piece of agitprop shot during the Nazi blitz. Even at this early stage, Jackson was leaving a personal imprint on the films he worked on; it is his voice, for example, doing the main narration on Night Mail – or, as he put it, “[E]verything but [W. H.] Auden's poetry” on the soundtrack.