Comedy Theatre in London. The play had a run on Broadway in 1943. Post War After the war Thompson returned to his work as scriptwriter under contract at Associated British on such films as No Place for Jennifer (1949) and For Them That Trespass (1949), the latter starring Richard Todd in his debut. Thompson was dialogue director on The Hasty Heart (1949), which turned Todd into a star. He later said he gave up dialogue directing because he found the job "impossible. My job was to take stars through their lines but I felt that I was also expected to be a spy for the front office. If a word was altered they wanted to know why. It was a way of keeping control." The same year his play The Human Touch, co written with Dudley Leslie, ran for more than a hundred performances at the Savoy Theatre in a production starring Alec Guinness. British film director Early films His first film as a director was Murder Without Crime (1950), made at ABPC, who put Thompson under contract. Thompson was offered £500 for the screen rights to the play and £500 to direct. He said "it was not so much that I wanted to direct movies it was to get the money so I could continue writing plays. But while directing it I got the feeling that I wanted to be a movie director." Thompson said "the fact is I found directing to be much easier than writing and I enjoyed it much more than writing as well. So I became a film director." The film was about a man who thinks he has committed murder. Thompson also wrote the screenplay, based on his own play Double Error. In the words of Thompson's Screenonline profile "this well structured film went largely unnoticed but contained many of the themes which were to characterise Lee Thompson's work: a good person's struggle with their conscience, an external force of evil, and an out-of-character moment of violence which has long-term consequences. Believing people can "commit crimes without being criminals", he sought to make his audiences condone or at least understand behaviour that they would normally condemn." Thompson's first film success was one he directed and co-wrote (with Anne Burnaby), The Yellow Balloon (1953), the story of a child who is blackmailed into helping a criminal after accidentally causing his friend's death. He followed it