morrison-dylan-fan
With the Christmas/New Year holiday coming up I started looking for movies that I could watch with my dad,and I was pleased to find that a DVD seller had recently tracked down a British Film Noir,which led to me getting set to jump in the back.The plot:Looking to make some easy money,young thugs Tony & Frank decide to rob a bookie.Seeing him walk out,Tony and Frank grab the bookie and knock him out.Finding the bookie with a suitcase,Tony and Frank try to run off with the suitcase,but find that the man has chained it to his wrist.Desperate to get the cash,Tony and Mark decide to throw the man in his own car and drive round to find a way to open the case.View on the film:For the trim 54 minute running time,director Vernon Sewell & cinematographer Reginald H. Wyer give the rebellious Film Noir teens a Kitchen Sink backdrop,as Frank's girlfriend Jean begins asking questions.Filmed largely outdoors,Sewell soaks up the early '60s London mist,as blunt side shots take Frank and Tony down every murky Film Noir street corner rotting in the outskirts of the city.Given a limited amount of time,the screenplay by Malcolm Hulke & Eric Paice does well at drawing the friction between street-smart Tony and self-aware Frank,whilst delivering a surprisingly icy supernatural final note,as Tony and Frank take a look at the backseats.
howardmorley
I did recently find this film on DVD in a rare video shop in Camden Lock, North London - no good waiting for it to appear on classic movie channels since TV executives are rather youth obsessed and this release is dated 1961, (the year Rod Laver won Wimbledon for the first time).Derren Nesbitt was the actor who kept your attention and played the thug in the manner I have seen him in most of his film appearances in the late 50s and early 60s.Most notably Derren had a trade mark bit part in "A Night To Remember"(1958) playing a fireman on the bow of upturned B lifeboat after "Titanic" had sunk.In the latter film I have an abiding memory of him staving off drowning passengers, with an oar, who are trying to get on and save themselves, shouting, "Get off! Get off! There's no room!It's every man for himself!!".It was films like this which endured in casting directors' minds when a thug had to be cast.So it was appropriate Derren did the coshing of the "bookie" in the subject film.Derren also appeared more menacing when he spoke, almost politely, in that soft spoken voice of his.The plot has been adequately commented on by other reviewers.It is a pity British cinemas no longer have a "B" movie on the programme.I know I am showing my age but in the 50s and early 60s we had "Pathe News" a cartoon, a "B" film then the main feature.Of course the moral code was in force then and criminals could never be seen to get away with the proceeds from violent robbery.
FilmFlaneur
(Spoilers)Writer, documentarist and director Sewell is one of those half-forgotten figures in British cinema whose work can still give considerable pleasure today, even though his long career (over 35 years and over 40 films) never reached the heights. His ‘Latin Quarter'(1945), an excellent horror film, was released in the week after the now much better-known ‘Dead of Night', broke the war-time horror movie moratorium in the UK. A few years later, and he was regularly working on less prestigious productions, including several taut low budget thrillers, that typically included supernatural elements, during the early 60's. ‘House of Mystery' (1961) ‘Strongroom' (1962) and, above all ‘The Man in the Back Seat' are amongst his best work, much better than many other undistinguished ‘quota quickies' of the time, each making a virtue out of the necessities of brevity, and budget.Small-time crooks Tony and Frank rob a track bookie, discover that his money is in a security bag chained to his wrist and, having first piled their victim into the back of his own vehicle, make off with him in a panic. The injured bookie remains huddled there for most of the film thereafter, as the two grow increasingly desperate seeking his disposal. Although mute, he is as much a ‘character' as the two leads, his silence making its own accusation. This is the case from the very start. The title and credits of the film roll out over a defining shot (one repeated often as a point of view through coming scenes), in which we are looking through the windscreen at Frank driving. Tony peers forwards from the back, anxious and expectant. Next to Tony is an empty seat, an unoccupied space to our minds already tainted with foreboding even before the opening crime. Even when, as is usual, he is invisible to the audience, the bookie's presence remains oppressive. The stricken passenger is both a symbol-in-situ of Frank and Tony's transgression, and a precognition of their fate.Whenever the two try and ditch their inert charge, some accident intervenes, making the guilty go on again with their burden. They can't open the bag without tools. They park in front of a busy garage door to try and open the bag, and are brusquely moved on. They get a blowout, and a suspicious road service man helps them on their way. They run out of petrol. They can drop the bookie, then urgently have to reclaim him, and a policeman confronts them at the roadside, and so on. Frank and Tony's desperate ride feels, and is, ultimately futile. Most obviously through the final catastrophe, on their drive up North. But it is also a circular journey: their crime is committed at a racetrack, the car stolen, the victim abducted. By the time they finally come to shake off the body, in order to make their final escape, they are back at a dog track again - as if none of their previous journeying had happened, or mattered. The all-pervasive nature of ‘fate' in this film is similar to that found in some of Fritz Lang's noir work of a few years earlier, where no man is immune to the faceless forces that buffet and frustrate him at every time..Benefiting from some excellent, atmospheric, night-time location shooting, ‘The Man in The Back Seat' has been dubbed an ‘anxiety dream' by one critic (David Pirie), and that is certainly true: as events succeed each other they have the quality of a nightmare. But this is also a film with supernatural overtones. The bookie's slumped body comes to haunt the two men (and at the end actually appears in the mirror as an accusing apparition to a startled Frank), like the ghost at Macbeth's feast, staring in silent recrimination of their crime. The fatal nature of this hallucination is emphasised at the close of the picture, with an audio ‘exclamation mark'. Frank painfully whispers the title of the film and, at that instant, the burning car explodes.At the centre of the film is the relationship between Frank and Tony (Derren Nesbit and Keith Faulkener, who also act together in Sewell's ‘Strongroom'). As Frank, the dominant of the two, Nesbit gives an excellent (and entirely characteristic) early performance. Soft spoken, wiley, immoral, and with a black sense of humour, he is an utterly contemptible villain. Normally restricted to supporting role status, here he is perfectly at ease in the low-life mileu Tony inhabits. His character also has a prominent handicap, his leg in plaster giving a visual echo of his crippling moral shortcomings. As the more conscience-stricken and weaker Frank, Faulkener gives a creditable performance. Biggest surprise is to realise that his girlfriend, Jean, is played by Carol White, later star of Ken Loach's ‘Poor Cow' and the historically important UK TV drama ‘Cathy Come Home'.‘The Man in The Back Seat' is probably unavailable on video and only surfaces occasionally on late night television. It is a salutory reminder of what gems still lay unnoticed in the backwater of British film, when critical attention is often focused elsewhere. As an outstanding example of what imagination can achieve on an enforced budget, and as a tour-de-force of fatalistic cinema, rare in English film, it is well worth seeking out.
