Payroll (1961)

The 1961 heist drama Payroll concerns a vicious gang of crooks led by the ruthless, cold blooded Johnny Mellors (Michael Craig) who, with the help of inside man Pearson (William Lucas) raid an armoured van carrying the wages of the local factory. Naturally the wheels come off the job a little as both the driver of the armoured van and one of the gang are killed in the heist. As the gang bide their time waiting for the heat to die off, Jean Parker - Billie Whitelaw's vengeful widow of the slain guard -  turns detective, applying the pressure on the guilt wracked Pearson as the rest of the gang start to come apart from within.

Like the previous year's Hell is a City (which also starred Whitelaw) Payroll marked the start of British cinema's desire to depict a far grittier, more honest realism than previously attempted and to address the fact that the UK was more than just London. Director Sidney Hayers who was a prolific yet unremarkable pair of hands for such drama breaks out of the falsehoods of the studio and the London-centric traditions to depict the industrialised, working class north - in this case the smoking factories, working docks and grimy, cobbled jiggers of Newcastle and Gateshead, all a decade before Get Carter punched a complacent cinema in its soft, flabby guts. 

Unfortunately, just like Hell is a City, this commendable effort is scuppered by the fact that their realism only goes so far; for some scenes Rugby in Warwickshire stands in for the plot's working class Newcastle, and the industrialised North East is populated by far too many middle-class London, cockney or mild north country accents as if to say that although we accept that the time has come for a degree of realism, let's make sure everyone can at least understand what our cast are saying. 

George Baxt's screenplay, based on a novel by Derek Bickerton, offers a grim noirish sensibility that destroys the naive notion of honour among thieves. Each character is depicted as calculating, selfish and without mercy, as they set about a series of double crosses that ensure crime does not pay. The film's strength perhaps lies in the fact that, despite the testosterone normally associated with heist dramas, Payroll offers two genuinely strong and rather meaty roles for women at a time when this was rather lacking across the board. As the widow Parker, Whitelaw has the biggest character journey, going from ordinary housewife and mother to dogged avenger, whilst French actress Françoise Prévost almost steals the film as Pearson's embittered wife; a woman saved by him during WWII and promised a better life, only to find herself unfulfilled in suburbia. She captures the very essence of that kind of woman who has previously had to get by on her wits and now knows no other way of life. She is determined to get what she wants, what she feels she is due, and is happy to do so completely without compunction.

Of the male cast, Michael Craig is surprisingly effective as an out and out villain. Granted one might expect Stanley Baker to occupy such a role, and he'd be perfect of course, but Craig feels just right here and his increasing immorality is all the more surprising given it comes from such a seemingly urbane, civilsed looking man rather than an obvious tough, even if you do feel that Tom Bell's increasingly dissatisfied 'lieutenant' could easily take him. That reminds me - it's always good to see Tom Bell, he was a favourite of my dad's back in the day (his current favourite is another Tom; Tom Hardy) and he's become one of mine since too. He brings the right sense of genuine grit required for the proceedings, especially as he's one of the few on display who has a legitimate northern accent, but you do find yourself yearning for his character to let rip a little more with the insubordination. 

Another familiar face who pops up that you're always happy to see is Kenneth Griffith, who appears here as the gang's liability, turning to drink and running off at the mouth. There's an amusing scene where he's followed from the pub by two young thugs who proceed to roll him in an alleyway - his prone body coming to rest on a sodden newspaper ad proclaiming 'I look my best on a Murphy' - whatever that was! In fact there's a few surprising examples of dark comedy on offer here, such as the factory employee who fearlessly jumps on the back of the getaway car only to wear a look that says 'what the hell am I doing?' before being unceremoniously pushed off by Craig's villain.

Overall, Payroll (which earned a new lease of life thanks to Julien Temple incorporating several clips into his 2009 Dr Feelgood biopic, Oil City Confidential) is a solid if a little unspectacular and overlong example of early 60s British noir. I enjoyed it, but I do think someone should have got Reg Owen to tone down his brassy, jaunty jazz score which borders on the intrusive at times and with a few notes that put me in mind of the opening bars to '80s gameshow Every Second Counts!

All Coppers Are... (1972) / The Strange Affair (1968)

I've spent the day today enjoying a double bill of two films shot within a few years of each other in the late 60s and early 70s that look at corruption and the negative image of the police force.

By the 1970s the media's representation of the police force had begun to accept the ugly truth. This was the decade that bid farewell to the reassuring paternal figures of Dixon of Dock Green and the squad at Z Cars and ushered in the warts and all tendencies of The Sweeney and Law and Order. Having read or heard of the increasingly widespread corruption within the force, the British audience was ready to accept that beneath the dark blue serge uniform lay characters who weren't whiter than white. They were prepared for a more hard edged realistic depiction.

Unfortunately, despite its inflammatory title All Coppers Are... (the missing word clearly being 'bastards', as the chant and series of tattoos and graffiti would have it) this film is surprisingly and resolutely conservative in its depiction of the police force. The only crime from our young PC here, played by former Fellini protege Martin Potter, is one of a lack of propriety as he finds himself cheating on his wife with Julia Foster and subsequently finding himself part of a ménage à trois with local small time criminal Nicky Henson, rather than being guilty of any actual corruption.

Indeed Sidney Hayers film, taken from a script by Allan Prior, takes great pains to depict society around the force as the issue rather than the boys in blue themselves; A pub landlord complains about Potter's presence because a copper in the bar upsets the ordinary decent folk (the joke here being that they're likely to be on the fringes of the criminal underclass and therefore are probably anything but decent), a GP called out to their sick baby initially resents the fact that Potter's wife didn't come to the surgery, but on seeing the uniform is immediately grovellingly helpful towards them and lastly, a student demo against an embassy representing a fascist embassy takes a violent turn - but its the students themselves who  start this by hurling bricks at the police.

Perhaps much of this is due to the producer, Peter Rogers. After all, the Carry On mogul was well known for his conservative politics and its true to say any trace of grit All Coppers Are... manages to convey is rather lost when his brother Eric overlays the action with an iffy unsuitably cheery and chirpy score that even includes some music later featured in the Carry On's themselves. This unfortunate decision also scuppered the thriller Assault which starred Suzy Kendall and Frank Finlay. Its commendable that Rogers chose to produce more than the moneyspinners that were the cheap and cheerful Carry On's, but its a shame he didn't make these efforts truly distinctive from them.

So whilst not wholly a success there's still a promising trace of gritty authenticity to proceedings, helped largely by the solid, unfussy direction from Hayers and the accomplished cast. Julia Foster as the girl in the middle is especially noteworthy. One of the 60s dollybirds, Foster never quite reached the heights that the likes of Julie Christie ultimately attained and this lack of comparable success actually works for the film in that she offers a kind of council estate glamour, a bit tired around the eyes and shabby around the edges, rather than an obviously out of place A-list chic. 

She was certainly, to quote the parlance of the day, a bit of alright, and the film goes to great lengths to display that and the effect she has on both Potter and Henson with close ups of her breasts struggling to be kept within an assortment of revealing tops. That said, I think Potter was made to cheat on his wife, played by the more subtly attractive and classy Wendy Allnutt who would later be known as the woman who wrote the 'dear John' letter in the 80s BBC sitcom Dear John.

The Strange Affair, now this is more like it. The concluding part of my afternoon double bill certainly delivers on the murkier aspects of the metropolitan police in a way that its companion All Coppers Are... failed to do.

On the surface you'd imagine 1968's The Strange Affair would be the more standard, tamer production of the two focusing as it does on Michael York's titular Strange, a fresh faced university educated and optimistic new beat bobby in a London seemingly still lit by The Blue Lamp - albeit dimly. But events soon takes a darker, seedier turn, made all the more affecting by both its swiftness and what feels like its inherent authenticity. The film also stands out thanks to the remarkably distinctive and classy direction of David Greene (responsible for that other overlooked gem from the joint-end of the swinging 60s, I Start Counting) which is determined to deliver a quirky definitively 60s look to the action as opposed to the grittiness the storyline would suggest, and to the impressive, modish and experimental jazz score from Basil Kirchin that enlivens the action and gives the film a flavour of the cop drama we had started to see on the other side of the Atlantic around this time. 

The corruption is satisfactorily shown in two ways; firstly the police officers who are depicted taking bribes to turn a blind eye to some crimes, as represented by the CID officer on the payroll of Jack Watson's character Quince, himself a former officer who now rules his patch of London and supplies heroin via the local heliport alongside a pair of psychotic pinstripe suited mod sons. And secondly, officers who are willing to bend the law they uphold to punish specific criminals, in this case the dogged Jeremy Kemp (himself a former regular on Z Cars) who will do anything to nail the Quince family. The Strange Affair readily and unflinchingly embraces the grey area of policing, presenting these situations as it sees them and offering up the lesser of the two evils.

From a modern day, post Yewtree point of view there's also the interesting subplot involving Strange’s love interest played by Susan George. She is the physical embodiment of the phrase 'gaol-bait' being as she is a deeply promiscuous and extremely underage Sloaney hippy who, along with her aunt and uncle, espouses the most permissive views - too permissive in fact as its revealed said aunt and uncle are an immoral pair who secretly film her having sex with Strange and flog the film round the seedy fleapits of Soho.  Everyone knows she is underage, including the seemingly honest to a fault Strange, but no one actually seems to care. As I say, interesting in these modern times.

Needless to say Strange gets in over his head (especially in one chilling scene where he's tortured by the Quince's with a pneumatic drill) and backed into several corners until before long he's turned into - if he ever even imagined it for one moment, that is - the very thing he thought he would never be thanks to a series of situations he is incapable of acting against. 

All in all this is an interesting 60s film that is long overdue some serious appreciation.

B Road, B Movie

Deadly Strangers is a mid 70s thriller from director Sidney Hayers (The Avengers) and starring Hayley Mills and Simon Ward.

It marks a return to the more mature X rated work in the genre of the psychological thriller that former child star Hayley Mills found success with in the late 1960s alongside co-star Hywel Bennett (notably Twisted Nerve and Endless Night) However, Hywel is missing here and I can't help feeling the film would have been much stronger if she could have tempted her old partner back into the fold. Indeed, I'm wondering if it was originally slated as a Hayley/Hywel vehicle from the off?

It's quite a staple formulaic plot for a chiller; a deranged, violent psychopath has escaped from a mental hospital and is stalking the B roads around Wycombe. Hayley plays Belle Adams, a young woman keen to see her childhood home once more. She accepts a lift from a lorry driver (Ken Hutchison) but flees when he tries to rape her. She's subsequently picked up by a blue Austin Maxi. Its driver, Steven Slade, played by Simon Ward, is a shy and introverted young man guzzling whisky behind the wheel. An uneasy friendship is formed as they face a serious of problems and some unnerving flashbacks into their own past that means each character has a reason to evade the police road blocks ahead.

But is one of them the escaped lunatic?

Well, of course!

And, in the best traditions of the sports on TV news. If you don't want to know the result, look away! As later in this post I will reveal it


Still with me? Good.


The look of this film is suitably Britain mid 70s, and by that I mean it is incredibly drab. The weather throughout is grim; the B roads are rain lashed and you can almost feel the filthy cold sheet of sped through puddles across your ankles and  see the greasy rain spattered windscreens.

The film colour also screams 70s, as every scene seems shot through with dull greens and shit browns. The technicolour glamour and almost Ladybird book art hue of Hayley's previous thrillers such as Twisted Nerve and Endless Night is nowhere to be found here and the film looks decidedly lower in budget. Indeed it could pass as made for TV.

Simon Ward is a capable enough male lead and his social ineptitude ("Do you know it takes four hours to cook an ostrich egg?" he says by way of an opening gambit to Hayley, adding he read that icebreakers were crucial in 'How To Make Friends') elicits the requisite sympathy even though, as the film progresses, his character darkens as our suspicions grow; we learn he's a deeply repressed individual who is impotent in the bedroom (seen in flashback, alongside Hayley's own troubled past in which we learn her parents died in a car crash and she was adopted by a rather lecherous abusive uncle) capable only of using pornography and peeping on women as they undress - which he does with a really unbelievably dollybird petrol pump attendant, who just strips off in the ladies loo for no reason, before being slain by the unseen escapee, and later to Hayley herself - yes readers this is a film where Hayley gets her kit off.

Look its Hayley's bum!

She shows her boobs too ;)

However I can only view him as a replacement for Hywel, whether Hywel was originally considered or not, the role just scream out for him and a continuation of his partnership with Hayley.


There's also a brief cameo for Hollywood's former hardman Sterling Hayden as an eccentric lonely old timer who comes across Hayley during a brief separation from Simon in the film's middle section. He befriends her and tries to woo her in anoff season seaside town in a befuddled Walter Mitty style manner (he has a yacht-it's a rusting ferry on the coastline, he owns a deserted funfair arcade) which flatters her despite Sterling looking like a template of a Postman Pat character

The funfair arcade, the wittily titled Crazy House...

someone's escaped from a mental home, geddit?

*sighs* that beard!

Reunited with Simon, she let's the old guy down gently before hitting the road once more. But Sterling has seen the newspaper, and he's keen to catch up with the pair, yelling for Simon. They eventually lose him and head to a hotel for the night, taking a copy of the paper with them to read later, with its eye opening front page....

In the film's closing ten minutes you're literally screaming for one of them to pick the paper up and read the headlines! And it's the film's most effective part; a suitably tense finale, as Simon spies on the undressing Hayley through the keyhole.

Finally, Hayley sees the paper begins to panic and flee, only to be hotly pursued by Simon into the forest beyond.  Whilst at the local police station a traffic cop, who pulled them up for a defective headlamp, picks up the same paper and the truth is revealed for us....

The truth will out

It's a brilliant trick and reveal, completely pulling the rug from under the viewer made all the more stunning by Hayley's completely believable panic as she is pursued by Simon. Why is she panicking? Well because if he realises who she is she'll be recaptured! She's a genuinely cool customer, completely unhinged (and how believable is that mug shot on the front page?!) and the viewer really should have suspected all along, given how she chain smokes so sensually!

Hayley's flashback plays out in the film's climax; her uncle (Peter Jeffrey) whilst drunk attempts to rape her, she fights back and strangles him with a length of cord. It's bad news for Simon, as the flashback is interspersed with his own fate-yes, Hayley's lying in wait for him in the back seat of the Maxi and she proceeds to strangle him to, just as the police appear on the horizon.

The cavalry however is too late, Simon's character is dead and Hayley, sated, (there's something distinctly post orgasm like about her here) is taken, meekly and without complaint, back into custody.

It's an enjoyable film that would easily pass 90 minutes of a rainy afternoon or a late evening. It doesn't completely add up; you can sort of understand how the chase sent Hayley into a catatonic state in which she had to relive the murder of her uncle upon Simon, but why did she kill the petrol pump girl? Her only crime was to openly flirt with Simon-the only explanation I can come up with is Hayley's suspicions about her uncle were first realised when she spied him shagging some young girl in the stables; perhaps the petrol pump girl's obvious sexuality sparked that instinct again? But such head scratching moments don't detract from the overall experience. I'm actually surprised Hollywood haven't tried to remake this (after all they remade And Soon The Darkness) with two attractive young leads on the open roads of Arizona say?

Compared to Hayley's work with Hywel though; it's inferior. I still can't help but imagine this with him, the twist of having Hywel as an innocent after their previous two outings would have been ingenious.

It's another film that is bafflingly not commercially available. However, if you know where to look, you can purchase it. I did a few years ago ;)