Basil Dearden (1963)
Film vehicles for British pop chart-toppers in the late 1950s and early 1960s were often designed to reinforce the new star’s musical credentials as much as to further a film acting career. An extreme example is The Tommy Steele Story (1957), which reached cinemas less than a year after Steele’s breakthrough hit, ‘Rock with the Caveman’, entered the charts. The film dramatises Tommy-as-himself’s meteoric rise to teen idol, as well as featuring plenty of his singing. What a Crazy World (1963) may be more typical. The cast includes a few recently successful pop acts, including Marty Wilde and Susan Maughan, but the lead is Joe Brown, whose ‘A Picture of You’ was a number one single the previous summer. Brown plays an unemployed working-class Londoner, Alf Hitchens, eager to break into the music business as a songwriter; even so, he sings the composition that he hopes will make his name (the film’s title song), and other numbers. Shaky storytelling leaves it unclear quite how much Alf has achieved his ambition by the film’s end, but he has landed a job in the office of a Denmark Street music agent, so we take it he’s going the right way.
In 1961 Michael Scheuer graduated with a BA from London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. A year later, as Mike Sarne, he was top of the British singles charts (just before Joe Brown) with ‘Come Outside’, memorably accompanied by ‘Little Doll’ Wendy Richard. By early 1963, during the infamous winter of that year, he was doing location filming in Bethnal Green for A Place to Go[1], in which he played the lead. Was Mike Sarne part of the current fashion for promoting pop stars as potential film stars? Not really – and not only because he’d already done a fair bit of cinema and television acting (some of it seemingly while still a SSEES student) albeit the roles were uncredited or minor. In A Place to Go, Sarne’s Ricky Flint is a young Cockney desperate for something more than a box room in his family’s cramped terraced house and work in a cigarette factory. The film starts in a pub with Ricky singing the title song, to an appreciative audience that already knows him. ‘A Place to Go’ is briefly reprised in the closing sequence and Sarne has sung a second number, ‘Out and About’, in the meantime. But Ricky Flint’s dreams of a better life are less focused than Alf Hitchens’ and don’t depend on belief in his musical talents. Ricky just wants out of Bethnal Green and turns to crime for the instant payday that can be his passport to more exciting places.
Basil Dearden had already directed several films strongly dependent on their London settings – The Blue Lamp (1950), Pool of London (1951), Sapphire (1959), even The League of Gentlemen (1960). The last three all involved his long-time producing partner, Michael Relph, as did A Place to Go, for which Relph also wrote the screenplay (with ‘additional dialogue’ by Clive Exton), adapted from Michael Fisher’s 1961 novel Bethnal Green. Locale matters perhaps more in A Place to Go than in any of those other Dearden pictures. A contemporary New York Times review[2] of the source novel thought ‘The best thing in the book – and this is a very good thing indeed – is Bethnal Green itself. Mr Fisher moves through the streets of his district with such knowing assurance, observes its changes of light and season and weather with such precision, that in the end it is the feel of the place that remains in the mind’. The same goes for A Place to Go, shot in black and white by Reginald H Wyer. Dearden and Relph clearly set out to emulate the visual realism of British New Wave hits like Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961).
This, alas, heightens the mismatch between visual design and the performances in A Place to Go – more specifically, a lack of orchestration of the acting. I’ve seen enough Dearden films by now to realise how erratic he was in this department. A director can’t alchemise a cast but a good one will show the actors to best advantage. Among the four earlier films mentioned, Dearden signally fails to do that with some of the lesser-known players in Sapphire. A Place to Go is different in that the cast members, well known or not, are mostly capable yet they seem to be performing in isolation from one another. It doesn’t help that the best actor in the film, Bernard Lee, is miscast as paterfamilias Matt Flint, who shocks his family by suddenly leaving his job at the docks and trying his hand as a street entertainer – an escapologist – with ignominious results. The miscasting isn’t a matter of Lee’s physical size and solidity, which makes Matt’s sweating and straining to break free of his chains (!) on the street the more gruelling to watch. It’s rather that the character needs an emotional volatility that doesn’t come naturally to Lee, who therefore overacts to achieve this quality. As Matt’s wife Lil, Doris Hare is fine when the dramatic stakes aren’t high but that’s increasingly less often as the story progresses. Her husband dies suddenly; the Flints’ street is part of a slum clearance programme; the aftermath to a botched robbery involving Ricky lands him in hospital and, almost as soon as he’s discharged, up in court. Doris Hare is the prime example here of a performer in a virtual vacuum. Indomitable East End matriarch as she is, Lil Flint is worn down by the run of family misfortunes: Doris Hare suffers not just nobly but slowly, too – to the disadvantage of whoever happens to be sharing the screen with her.
The story’s central relationship is Ricky’s on-off romance with a feisty, flighty local girl called Cat Donovan, played by Rita Tushingham, in just her second film role after A Taste of Honey. As usual, Tushingham is better when not speaking. Ricky buys Cat a canary in a cage, from a market trader (an uncredited George Sewell, who appears for all of thirty seconds but still makes a good impression). According to one of cinema’s golden rules, the caged bird has symbolic significance. Cat wants to set it free; things don’t look good when the canary makes its way to a flat roof where a different cat is waiting but the bird manages to fly away: as it does so, Rita Tushingham’s face is beautifully expressive. Whenever Cat has a chunk of dialogue, Tushingham is much less natural but there is a connection – a welcome rarity in this film – between her and Mike Sarne. The younger actors in smaller but significant roles – Barbara Ferris, David Andrews and William Marlowe – all do creditably. Ferris is Ricky’s sister, Betsy, who’s living at her parents’, along with her lorry-driver husband Jim (Andrews) and their new baby. Charlie Batey (Marlowe) – Cat’s in an on-off relationship with him, too – is a sidekick of Jack Ellerman (John Slater), the local Mr Big who recruits Ricky and Jim for the robbery at Ricky’s workplace.
Neither Ricky nor Jim has been in trouble with the law before; both, for different reasons, need money. Decent Jim, whose lorry will be the getaway vehicle, drops out on the eve of the robbery so Ricky decides to drive the lorry himself. He creeps into the bedroom where Betsy, Jim and the baby are sleeping, and nicks the ignition keys from Jim’s trousers pocket. During the robbery, Ellerman asks Ricky to stand guard and gives him a cosh to use if necessary; a bobby on the beat stops just outside the factory entrance where Ricky lurks in the shadows. Ricky had no qualms about thieving but can’t go through with GBH or worse. He makes a panicky escape in Jim’s lorry, which Charlie later that night sets on fire. As Ricky tries to quench the flames, the tank blows up; the next we see of Ricky, he’s just a pair of eyes, a nose and a mouth emerging through bandages. When he leaves hospital, his face scarred from burns, he calls on his mother in her new council flat before going to the pub and getting into a knife fight with Charlie Batey. Up before a magistrate (Norman Shelley), both men claim that Cat is their girl; Ricky goes further by lying that he and Cat are engaged. Cat is conveniently on hand to give testimony. She looks at her two suitors in the dock and lies to save Ricky’s bacon. The magistrate lets him off lightly; he’s bound over to keep the peace for a year and charged three pounds costs.
Dearden and Relph were remarkably productive around this time, releasing two films in each of 1960 (The League of Gentlemen, Man in the Moon), 1961 (Victim, The Secret Partner) and 1962 (All Night Long, Life for Ruth). They’d completed The Mind Benders just before making A Place to Go. (In a sequence where Ricky and Cat go to the pictures, you can spot an in-joke poster for The Mind Benders.) You can’t help thinking the pair were spreading themselves too thin, though: A Place to Go is careless, in various ways. Although the robbery goes wrong, there is a break-in at the factory and Charlie uses the cosh as Ricky couldn’t, though the policeman survives the attack: there’s no follow-up to either crime. Jim Ellerman once carried a torch for Lil Flint and says he’s always had a soft spot for Ricky: the film seems to be preparing to reveal (as Michael Fisher’s novel does, according to Wikipedia) that Ricky is the crime boss’s son, but it doesn’t, and Jim Ellerman (well played by John Slater) just disappears from the story. It’s clear that escapology is taking its toll on Matt Flint’s health. He’s breathless on the street; when he and Lil return home to find Ellerman in conversation with Ricky, Matt gets angry, clutches his chest and keels over unconscious. Bernard Lee collapses impressively but Dearden seems not to have pointed out to him that Matt isn’t meant to be suffering a heart attack. (The hospital doctor who breaks the bad news to Ricky explains that Matt died of ‘a stroke and a brain haemorrhage’.)
Dearden fares better with the relatively action-packed sequences – the factory break-in, Ricky’s fight with Charlie (which is particularly well done: you can believe that other people in the pub join in, for the hell of it). A scene at a dog track (Clapton Stadium) moves in ways few other scenes in the film do. ‘It’s not the same as having your own front door’, laments Lil, when Ricky admires her new flat, way up in a tower block. Jim and Betsy manage to get their own place with the insurance money for the lorry; Betsy says it’s nice ‘but a bit lonely’. The message here is clear enough – hard-scrabble community making way for mod-cons anonymity – but another aspect of A Place to Go as social comment is harder to get a handle on: this may be part of the film’s slackness but the effect is interesting. The lenient magistrate expresses the hope that Ricky will ‘get married … settle down’, and that’s what he and Cat decide to do. In the final sequence they run hand in hand towards Ricky’s old street, which they find being demolished. On paper, the story’s resolution sounds thoroughly socially conservative – Ricky was wrong to dream big, is right to stay on his own modest patch. But the closing shots, as he and Cat, hand in hand, pick their way through the rubble of the old street and head towards a high-rise block beyond – towards their future – is more ambiguous. There’s a snatch of the lyrics from ‘A Place to Go’, and they now sound ironic.
The film is such a weird concoction of styles and moods that you can only admire Charles Blackwell’s resourceful music – comically jaunty one moment, crime-thrillerish the next. Blackwell, who worked with Joe Meek before becoming a highly successful music arranger and producer in his own right, had written ‘Come Outside’ the previous year and he wrote the two songs for A Place to Go ‘in collaboration with Mike Sarne’. The film confirms Sarne as a likeable, not very brilliant singer and an engaging, unremarkable actor. He didn’t carry on with the music for long. He has continued to act over the decades but no more big roles. Compared with Ricky Flint, though, Mike Sarne certainly went places. By 1970, he was in Hollywood, directing Mae West and Raquel Welch in Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge.
19 August 2025
[1] Although dated 1963 on IMDb and by BFI, the film was released in Britain in early 1964.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1961/08/27/archives/how-does-a-man-fit-into-the-brave-new-world-bethnal-green-by.html
