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.
But a queasy, grisly fear settles on the criminals, as they crouch in their van weighing up the next move. What if no one notices the two are missing and they are left to die of suffocation in the vault? Nothing is said out loud but they realise they could swing for this, manslaughter or not. Murder was a capital offence when this movie was released and there was often not much delay between conviction and execution. Their spasm of pseudo-conscience sets in train disastrous consequences. Time is running out – and as well as the chill of horror at their crime there is an amazingly real, delicately managed almost-romance that seems to grow between Mr Spencer and Miss Taylor. They are forced to loosen their clothing in the stultifying heat and their inhibitions dwindle along with the air supply – though of course in the most poignantly reticent, platonic way – as they realise they might be about to die.
The movie delivers a couple of big shocks, with the biggest saved for just before the closing credits, and everything is briskly wrapped up inside 80 minutes. The performances are stagy and yet robust in the manner of British cinema of those days, but always plausible and watchable. Nesbitt has a swarthy kind of non-handsomeness; in the same year he was the unforgettably nasty blackmailer-hoodlum in Basil Dearden’s Victim. Audiences both in 1962 and 2026 might assume a kind of redemption is on the way, along with a crime-doesn’t-pay moral. But no.
• Strongroom is in UK and Irish cinemas from 30 January; it is on Blu-ray from 23 February and on BFI Player from 23 March.
