I have a lot of respect for the efforts of Ted Willis but I'm starting to hate his scripts, with their simple working class folk singing songs and being working class and struggling and overacting melodrama. Maybe I watched this in a bad mood.
I hated the smug cop Ronald Lewis, and all the chattering working class singalongs, and the nervy tick hammy acting of the kid brother, and the fact Sylvia Syms was so weak and just whined. The character I had sympathy for was Herbert Lom's gang boss - at least he had a bit of drive; he also has a very sympathetic backstory (beaten up by his dad) and empathetic career arc, being in love with Syms.
The film would've been far better that Sym's character been hot for Lom but she's so anti him and he grabs her and then she kisses him in a really unconvincing scene.
The film felt miscast - Melvyn Hayes never felt like Syms' brother and Joan Miller never felt like her mother. While Syms is a very good actor I feel the movie would've worked better with Diana Dors in her role - there was something more inherently lower class in Dors' personal (had nothing to do with their real circumstances); you would feel her attraction to a gangster more than Syms. Maybe it would've worked better with younger/sexier men... Howard and Lom feel so middle aged. Imagine say, Michael Craig or John Fraser or some other young spunk. It would've been so much more interesting.
In the film's defence maybe the censors wrecked it - for instance the mother whoring out Syms felt reduced.
But surely the censor wasn't responsible for Hayes' hysterical overacting. By the end of this film I was hating it - Hayes whining on and on, blaming society, blaming Lom, acting, acting, acting. It was a relief when Syms shot him (I think we were meant to think it was tragic but he was so irritating).
I don't mean to be mean. Maybe I should read the original play. The story is solid - gangster employs boy, goes out with his sister whose mother pimps her out. But they didn't execute it well.
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