starring Sally Gray, Trevor Howard
directed by Alberto Cavalcanti
99 minutes
Clem Morgan (Trevor Howard), a former RAF ppilot who is unemployed and desperate for work, joins a criminal gang in London. Narcy, the leader of the gang, steals Clem's girlfriend and frames Clem for the murder of a police officer that another member of the gang committed. Clem is sentenced to 15 years in prison but escapes less than a year later and goes on the run.
Clem gets framed for another murder while he is on the run, this time by a woman who asks him to kill her husband. She ends up doing it herself when he turns down her request. Clem looks up Sally Conner (Sally Gray), a dancer who once offered to help him. She helps him evade the police and Narcy's gang until she is taken hostage by Narcy and his gang.
The police capture Clem but then let him go in the hopes that he can help them get the goods on Narcy and his gang.
I saw this movie as part of the 2024 edition of the Noir City DC film festival. It was introduced by Forster Hirsch. This movie was the front half of a double feature. The back half was Aimless Bullet (1961). The thread that connects the two is that they are both set in the immediate aftermath of war and deal with its impact on people of limited means.
One quibble I have with this movie is the way that Sally enters the picture. It seems a bit odd. She doesn't meet him or get to know him until after he has been locked up. I thought it was odd that she would choose that moment to reach out to him for the first time.
It took 20 minutes or more for this movie to get its hooks into me. The further I got into it the more I enjoyed it. On the whole I thought it was quite good although Clem's fighting prowess towards the end of the movie borders on that of a suprhero.
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