Hell is a City - 1960 film review

Of all the black and white British cop films of the 50s and early 60s, Hell is a City stands out. There were some other good police movies, certainly, but this one, directed by Val Guest, is excellent from start to finish. There are two reasons for this.

First, the source material. The film was based on Somewhere in the City, a novel by Maurice Procter, who had been a serving police officer before his writing career took off. Procter's books were authentic, and this authenticity is, thankfully, preserved in the movie version. I've been a Procter fan for a long time, and about twenty years ago, I wrote an intro for another of his books, The Midnight Plumber, which features Harry Martineau, as this story does. The late Peter Walker, another cop who became a crime writer, told me that Procter encouraged him to join the CWA back in the 60s. They never actually met, but Peter took the advice and went on to become Chair of the CWA.

Second, the acting. The cast is excellent, and the brilliant Stanley Baker is ideally suited to the role of Martineau, who is married, but not very happily, to the equally discontented Maxine Audley. Billie Whitelaw makes a brief but telling contribution as an ex girlfriend of the killer on the run whom Martineau is hunting, and her husband is played by Donald Pleasence, taking a meek rather than sinister role for once. Joby Blanchard, who starred in Doomwatch, is one of the bad guys, and George A. Cooper, Warren Mitchell, Russell Napier, and even John Comer and Doris ("Annie Walker") Speed in very small parts, all contribute.

The story is a simple one. It's a manhunt, and we're never in doubt that Martineau will get his man. But Val Guest's screenplay compels interest from start to finish, and although Stanley Black's jazzy soundtrack is occasionally intrusive, overall it adds to the atmosphere. The scenes on the moors north east of Manchester, which a few years later would become associated with Brady and Hindley, also make an atmospheric background to key parts of the film. Recommended.

Payroll - 1961 film review

I was urged to watch Payroll by book dealer Jamie Sturgeon, and what a good recommendation it turned out to be. Filmed around Newcastle and Gateshead, and released in 1961, it anticipates Get Carter, a much more renowned gangster movie set in the north east, but makes compelling viewing. Part of this is due to an excellent script by George Baxt, based on a book by Derek Bickerton, and part to excellent acting from a cast that includes Billie Whitelaw, Kenneth Griffiths, Michael Craig, Tom Bell, and Glyn Houston.

It's a heist movie, as the title implies (the film's alternative title, I Promise to Pay, doesn't make much sense to me). A large business changes its payroll security arrangements, much to the dismay of a gang of robbers, led by Craig and including the menacing Bell in an early role as well as the flaky Griffiths. They have persuaded the firm's accountant, played by William Lucas, to help them - his' motive is to earn more money so as to keep his beautiful but demanding foreign wife (played, very well, by Francoise Prevost) happy. The new security system seems invincible, but Craig is determined to go on with his plan.

The result is tragic - in the raid on an armoured van, one member of the security team loses his life. His widow, played by Whitelaw with her customary intensity, determines to avenge him. Meanwhile, the robbers have lost one of their own men, and they soon begin to fall out among themselves. Further complications arise when Craig starts to take an interest in Prevost, whose role in the story proves to be pivotal.

The story is gripping, but the script also has depth, and the characterisation is subtler than I'd expected. Bell and Griffiths come to a very sticky end, quite literally, and the final scenes involving Craig and Prevost make for a suitably dramatic conclusion. I really enjoyed this one. The black and white location shots are highly atmospheric, and all in all, Id' say it's a hidden gem. Strongly recommended.

Twisted Nerve - film review

Twisted Nerve is a controversial film from 1968, a horror story about a psychopath in sub-Hitchcock vein. It combines a number of excellent ingredients with some questionable taste. It's almost always a mistake to judge films, or books, from the past by the standards of today, but even in 1968, I think there was something rather disturbing about this movie, not least in its rather dodgy (and, I think, unncessary to the plot) science about the nature of psychopathy and its relationship with disability. It's directed and co-written by Roy Boulting, but much, much darker than the Boulting Brothers' usual fare.

When I first saw this movie, as a student in the Seventies, I was startled to find that the lead character, played by Hywel Bennett, was an ex-Oxford man called Martin. To say that I didn't identify with him would be an under-statement. Not only was the young Hywel Bennett conspicuously handsome, he was playing a character who is seriously disturbed and very dangerous indeed.. A weird, baby-faced guy with an affluent but troubled family background, he becomes obsessed with a pretty young librarian (Hayley Mills) and concocts an elaborate scheme which involves him conning his way into the large house in which her mother (the superb Billie Whitelaw) takes paying guests, and contriving an alibi so as to stab his stepfather (Frank Finlay) to death.

The murder is investigated by a jaundiced cop played by Timothy West, while one of Martin's fellow lodgers is played by Barry Foster. By any standards, it's a terrific cast, and the Hitchcock connection is emphasised by the fact that Foster and Whitelaw appeared in the great man's late film, Frenzy - also about a sociopathic killer - as well by the haunting score, written by Hitchcock's favourite soundtrack composer, Bernard Herrmann.

Twisted Nerve is rather strange, not least because it is slow-moving with occasional bursts of lurid action. Yet it is undeniably chilling, in all sorts of ways. As for Hywel Bennett, his health problems have been well documented for a long time, but in his hey-day in the Sixties, he was not only very good-looking but also a very fine actor. It's sad that he wasn't able to maintain the brilliant standards of the first part of his career, but his best performances are genuinely striking..