Sidney Hayers (1961)
Payroll is set and was shot on location in Newcastle-upon-Tyne though there’s hardly a Geordie accent to be heard throughout. Sidney Hayers’s crime drama is lame when it tries to be a slick thriller, which it does most of the time. The camera zooms and Reg Owen’s jazzy score must have come across as clumsy attempts to be edgy even in 1961. More interesting is the development of the two main female characters in the story, which revolves around a payroll robbery and its aftermath. A security van driver, Harry Parker (William Dexter), is killed in the heist; his widow Jackie (Billie Whitelaw), impatient with the police investigation, decides to get revenge herself. Meanwhile, the self-interested Katie Pearson (Françoise Prévost) – married to Dennis (William Lucas), the wormy accountant who fed the gang inside information on his firm’s security arrangements – has an affair with the chief robber, Johnny Mellors (Michael Craig).
The two women are baldly contrasted from the start. Jackie is a conventional, contented young wife and mother. Childless Katie is exotic, stultified and frustrated by the modest standard of living that Dennis’s wages and her dressmaking from home provide. The wives’ emergence from suburban interiors into the foreground of the crime plot gives a bit of distinction to Payroll (George Baxt’s screenplay is based on a novel by Derek Bickerton) – even if Jackie’s vigilantism starts to verge on the ludicrous. Billie Whitelaw is excellent in the first half of the film and in her playing of Jackie’s early reactions to her husband’s death. The relationship with Mellors also turns melodramatic but Françoise Prévost makes what draws Katie to him nicely complicated: she finds Mellors physically attractive but the desire to get her hands on some of the robbery money is stronger.
Michael Craig is miscast and pretty bad as the supposedly vicious and volatile Mellors but, not for the first time, better when he’s acting with women rather than men. Tom Bell, as Mellors’s sidekick, a snarling whippet called Blackie, is something else. Unlike Craig, Bell really does come across as dangerously psycho. (Blackie’s preoccupation with the newspaper coverage the robbery is getting is also a good touch.) Dennis Pearson turns to crime in a desperate attempt to give his wife what she wants, materially if not sexually. For some reason, this man-or-mouse type tends to be overplayed (Steve Pemberton was a recent offender, in the first series of Happy Valley): William Lucas is no exception to the rule but he’s powerful in the moments when Dennis breaks down and his yells express the force of his inner desperation. The acting in some of the small parts is ropy but there’s also pleasure for someone like me, raised on 1960s television drama, in seeing cameos from the likes of Vanda Godsell and the underrated Stanley Meadows. Another, minor pleasure at this distance in time comes from the film’s proud display of an antique photocopier as state-of-the-art office technology.
29 July 2017
