Val Guest (1960)

This British crime thriller is an interesting hybrid and, at this distance in time, period piece.  It’s a Hammer Films production whose style and content are far removed from gothic horror.  The title isn’t the only hint of Hollywood-derived noir aspiration.  Val Guest’s film has a flavour too of the nascent British New Wave (Look Back in Anger and Room at the Top had appeared the previous year).  The titular city is Manchester, the film was shot on location there and the police investigation occasionally takes the action up into the moors above the metropolis.   It’s startling to see this landscape a few years before the Moors Murders made it notorious and familiar on television news.  (Guest’s film is in black-and-white, which reinforces the link with one’s memory of that TV footage.)  The year of Hell Is a City’s release also saw the passing of the Betting and Gambling Act that legalised off-course bookmakers, and gambling, on the cusp of that change, features strongly in the story.  The two elements combine in a remarkable scene, out on moorland, where a traditional reguonal form of gaming takes place.  This ‘tossing school’, in which money from the street robbery that sets the film’s main plot in motion changes hands, brings to mind the gambling episode in Ted Kotcheff’s later Wake in Fright (1971).  Val Guest’s is visually more powerful, though, not least because groups of figures in this particular terrain evoke police teams combing Saddleworth Moor.

The source material is a 1954 novel by Maurice Procter, one of a series of police procedurals he wrote featuring the detective Harry Martineau.  (Procter was himself a serving police officer when he started his writing career.)  Val Guest did the adaptation and it’s a neatly constructed screenplay.   After escaping from prison, recidivist criminal Don Starling (John Crawford), with the help of his sidekicks (Joby Blanshard and Charles Morgan), robs a bookmaker (Donald Pleasence) by ambushing two of his employees en route to the bank with the bookie’s winnings.  The gang abducts the girl employee (Lois Daine); in the getaway car, Starling hits her with a cosh to keep her quiet and inadvertently kills her.  The highly experienced Martineau (Stanley Baker) makes use of his various local contacts to help track the gang down.  Starling is eventually arrested, after a climactic showdown between him and Martineau.  In a virtual postscript to the main action, the latter watches people gathered outside the prison where Starling is hanged for murder – another reminder of exactly when this film was made (a few years before the suspension of capital punishment that preceded its formal abolition with effect from 1970).

Compact and well paced, Hell Is a City has good cops-and-robbers action sequences supplemented by scenes that offer a sometimes strikingly frank illustration of relations between police and those on the wrong side of the law – eapecially an interview between Martineau and a dodgy publican (George A Cooper).  The edgy, jazzy music by Stanley Black is a creditable attempt to import music typical of contemporary American urban dramas.  The personnel, for the most part, impart a more homely quality to proceedings:  the film is stocked with character actors familiar from British films and television of the era.  They include, as well as some of those already mentioned, Vanda Godsell, Peter Madden and Russell Napier.  Doris Speed pops up briefly as a hospital sister – perhaps the last time she appeared on screen before she became Annie Walker (Coronation Street started in December 1960).  Billie Whitelaw, in an early role as the bookie’s wife, hardly comes into this category of actor but she makes a strong impression.  The villain of the piece is a different matter and unsatisfactory.  As Starling, John Crawford gives a wooden performance.  His accent is stuck somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.

Stanley Baker, charismatic but always credible, holds everything together.  The cynical but still committed Harry Martineau makes a better job of his professional life than his private one.  Although Val Guest’s direction is less assured in the marital misery bits and Maxine Audley awkwardly overwrought as Martineau’s wife, Baker is so thoroughly inside his character that he seems to carry the residue of domestic rows into the office with him.  The spectacular but protracted rooftop climax reminded me of the church steeple finale of John Guillermin’s Town on Trial (1957), another film that strained for Hollywood dynamism.  But Stanley Baker makes it matter that Martineau comes out on top.  In the closing sequences, he walks through Manchester streets at night and exchanges a few words with the prostitute who approaches him.  It’s a nicely diminuendo ending – one that returns Martineau and his heroism to a convincing reality.

2 December 2018