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We’ve all been so busy praising Hamlet and Henry V that we have not understood that the factory workers and their wives much prefer to go to the pictures to see Frank Randle.
Holidays with PayNightbeat
One Night with You
Spring in Park Lane
A Song for Tomorrow
Cup-Tie Honeymoon
Holidays with Pay
The Red Shoes
Date with a Dream
Here Come the Huggetts
The Brass Monkey
February
British Lion went into full film noir mode with Nightbeat, a tale of dodgy spivs, racketeers, and seedy nightclubs, produced and directed at Isleworth by Harold Huth (replacing the originally intended director Brian Desmond Hurst) and shot in fifty-six days. Guy Morgan and T. J. Morrison’s screenplay had ‘new scenes and story editing’ by Roland Pertwee. Perhaps Mr Pertwee was responsible for the gloomier scenes stuffed with hard-bitten dialogue and suggestions of sexual abuse. Accusing Jackie of being a ‘two-faced dame’, Rocky (Nicholas Stuart) reminds her to ‘Remember the last time I beat you up.’ At least its leading man Maxwell Reed had some sort of animal attraction, a rare quality in British film actors of his period. The sunken depths of its story seem no place for the well-brought-up Anne Crawford, whose presence is eclipsed by the clearly dangerous villainess, nightclub singer Jackie, played by Christine Norden (‘of whom much is expected’) making her film debut.
The claustrophobic sexual relationships and fistfights and a night-time dockside chase are skilfully managed in a film that at times seems to point forward to The Blue Lamp of 1950, as well as pinpointing the difficulties that faced ex-servicemen after the war: will they go to the good or the bad? The film’s general murkiness includes two nightclub numbers by its composer Benjamin Frankel and lyricist Harold Purcell, ‘I’m Not in Love’ and ‘When You Smile’, sung by Norden. Neither is remarkable, although the MFB considered that ‘Once again Benjamin Frankel offers a score that is well-constructed and subtly shaded. Its integration with the dialogue is quite exceptionally successful.’ Sidney James is remarkably good as an exhausted pianist, and in the closing scenes Norden goes to pot splendidly.
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