Vernon Sewell’s outstanding British crime picture from 1962, co-scripted by veteran screenwriter Richard Harris, is now re-released. It is a taut, tough suspense thriller in black-and-white, leading to a sensationally grim final shot. It is in fact a B-movie, one of the support features that once made up a complete evening’s entertainment: a cheap’n’cheerful genre which, though often awful, sometimes liberated talented people to create terrific, unheralded work, and whose importance to film history has been valuably elucidated by critic Matthew Sweet. A character in this film in fact, about to go out to the cinema, talks about the importance of seeing the full programme.
Griff (played by Derren Nesbitt) leads a trio of robbers who raid a suburban bank just as it is about to shut up shop for the bank holiday weekend. In a horribly cynical touch, Griff poses as a postman to gain entrance using his dead father’s old uniform. Having manhandled the straitlaced manager Mr Spencer (Colin Gordon) and his demure secretary Miss Taylor (Ann Lynn) down into the basement to get them to open up the strongroom with all the cash, they lock the two employees in there and make their getaway.
