Strongroom Review – The hard-hitting thriller is a great 1960s British crime picture | film

VErnon Sewell’s excellent British crime thriller from 1962, co-written by veteran screenwriter Richard Harris, is now being re-released. It’s a powerful black-and-white suspense thriller, leading to a thrillingly bleak final shot. It is, in fact, a B-movie, one of the tentpole features that once constituted a complete evening’s entertainment: a cheap and cheerful genre, which, though often terrible, occasionally frees talented people to create great, unheralded works, and whose importance to the history of cinema has been demonstrated by the critic Matthew Sweet. In fact, one of the characters in this film, as she is about to go out to the movies, talks about the importance of watching the entire program.

Griff (played by Derryn Nesbitt) leads a trio of robbers who raid a suburban bank just as it is about to close up shop for the weekend. In a touch of terrible satire, Griff pretends to be a postman to gain entry using his dead father’s old uniform. After manhandling hard-headed manager Mr. Spencer (Colin Gordon) and his demure secretary Miss Taylor (Anne Lane) into the basement to get them to open the strong room with all the money, they lock the employees there and flee.

But horrifying fear settles over the criminals, as they sit in their truck and contemplate their next move. What if no one noticed that the two were missing and they were left to die of suffocation in the basement? Nothing is said out loud but they realize they can swing this, manslaughter or not. Murder was a capital offense when this film was released and there was often little delay between conviction and execution. The spasm of their false conscience leads to dire consequences. Time is running out – and in addition to the chilling horror of their crime, there is a surprisingly real and carefully managed romantic relationship that seems to be growing between Mr. Spencer and Miss Taylor. They are forced to loosen their clothing in the stifling heat and their inhibitions wane with the supply of air – though in the most restrained and poignant platonic way – when they realize they may be on the verge of death.

The film delivers a few big shockers, with the biggest saved for just before the closing credits, and everything is quickly wrapped up in the space of 80 minutes. The performances were theatrical but robust in the style of British cinema of those days, but always plausible and watchable. Nesbitt has a dark kind of unattractiveness. In the same year he was the unforgettably nasty blackmailer in Basil Dearden’s Victim. Viewers in 1962 and 2026 might assume that there is some sort of redemption on the way, along with a crime that has no morals. But no.