This is a British noir that plays out on the dirty dead-end streets of a
coal mining and steel producing town where everyone works for the industrial
companies and lives in depressing bare one roomers in dingy lodging houses.
Every street looks the same. It is a bleak life where the main escape is having
a few drinks after work in the local pubs and maybe a quick tumble in the
sheets with the wife before sleeping. Post-War England were hard times
and this was reflected in many of their gritty films - what they termed Kitchen
Sink realism of the working class trapped into their social position. Hiding
in a corner of British film were noirs - tending to be made on the cheap
that captured elements of the Kitchen Sink realism as well as the American
black and white crime films during the same period. This is a good example
of this with the three protagonists trapped like a mouse to glue. Fatalistic
as noirs often are with a downward spiral waiting for them with welcoming
knowing arms.
The music on the record player is soft and seductive, the lights have been
turned low and the languid girl is on the couch waiting for his first move,
but instead Johnny (George Baker) gets a call from some debt collectors, tells
them he has the money and quickly hightails it from London back to his home
town. He escaped from it ten years ago - one of the few who had the notion
and nerve to leave - but losing on the horses has brought him back to where
he started and hoped never to return. But at least he says to himself, he
will be safe here until he figures out a way to return to London. He could
not be more wrong. Your fate is your fate. It follows you like a bad stench.
He rents a room next to his brother George (Terence Morgan) who is an accountant
for the company. Johnny goes out on the veranda and his fate is sealed. Exercising
in short shorts is a neighbor who his brother has a crush on. Calico played
by Diana Dors, who is as sultry as a soft cushion with pouty lips begging
for attention and breasts daring you to look away. She spells trouble from
a mile away but who wants to be a mile away. As she says later, once I learned
that my legs were for more than walking on, I knew I could get men. Johnny
has been around though - in the big city - and he knows that she is no good
for any man - especially his brother - but those glistening lips and bed room
eyes - and there is a bed - hard to resist. Turns out his brother has
been filching from the company accounts to buy her things and he has eight
days to put it back. Quite good though the inevitableness of the plot always
hangs over the film like a dark shroud and takes away from the tension. You
feel like you are witnessing a three-way car crash in slow motion.
Dors was a big star back in the 1950s - as much for her private life full
of affairs (supposedly Rod Steiger among them), wild adult parties that she
threw, financial problems, three marriages - the tabloids loved her - as her
films. She tried for Hollywood but there was already Monroe, Mamie van Doren
and Mansfield and another blonde bombshell was not needed. Back in England
though she was very popular - so much so that she made it on the cover of
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band. She died young at 52 from cancer.
