Passport to Shame. What a great title, which is why it's surprising it should be changed to the more prosaic Room 43 across the Atlantic. It was more usual for British films going in that direction to have their names 'sexed-up' e.g. Hammer's The Flanagan Boy became Bad Blonde.
It is introduced pre-credits by Ex-Superintendent Robert Fabian 'Fabian of the Yard' himself, who claims that London 'has probably the worst prostitution problem in the world' and goes on to say that the film presents what is going on 'frankly, dramatically and accurately'. Though no doubt it was thought this necessary to forestall any problems with the BBFC, and it is striking how his inference that the majority of prostitutes were there by coercion rather than choice chimes with that of some modern radical feminists, it was quite true that many of the incidents the film depicts were commonplace. There really were gangster pimps and ponces like Herbert Lom's Nick Biaggi who terrorized any of their victims thinking of giving evidence against them, and the false wedding racket was widely used by the likes of the notorious Messina brothers and their low-life successors.
There is a great cast including some of my favourite actors, including Eddie Constantine, Diana Dors at her most spectacular, and Herbert Lom himself. Elwyn Brook-Jones is a strikingly slimy crooked solicitor, and while I've never rated Brenda De Banzie as a particularly convincing actress she's very good as a blowzy vicious madame. Scenes such as the fake wedding with the seedy guests are well done, though those toward the end, including the cabbies' attack on the vice den, borrowed from an earlier film, Noose, of a decade earlier tend toward the risible. Previously only available in a mutilated version sans the Fabian introduction, Passport to Shame has been released complete by Network on a R2 disc with vastly improved sound and visuals.
