Panic

I don't remember having already watched this film before, though it is in my collection. I understand why, when I see it now, there is really nothing special, despite its obvious qualities. The story is not that riveting, tense or hard boiled. Just a good time waster from a director who became famous for some adventure and horror films in the sixties and fifties. This one, I doubt anyone rememebers it in John Gilling's filmography and career. It reminds us that he was also a crime film provider, but mostly in the fifties, not the sixties. I am glad, however, to have seen it again. It remains a good film.

By the end of John Billing's 1963 Neo Noir PANIC, a has-been boxer, who just got a pounding in the ring, is about to be killed by a punk crook in a back alley, and what climaxes into a sparse b-movie was quite complicated, even surreal, beginning with what should have been an easy jewelry office heist that morphs into the most hackneyed plot device ever...

And bad old amnesia's thrust upon lead ingenue Janine Gray, the secretary where the diamond got swiped by a gang plotted by her boyfriend played by an edgy, James Cagney-looking, trumpet-playing loser Dyson Lovell as Johnny, sending two goons including JUNGLE GIRLS lowlife Brian Weske and a mug-faced Stanley Meadows...

But PANIC only seems to be about these seedy crooks until the entire plot deliberately derails into a nighttime odyssey by amnesiac ingenue Janine Gray as Janine, who, like ODD MAN OUT, becomes an unwitting post-heist victim of street-life circumstance, happening upon an eclectic lot ranging from a lusty landlord and a deranged Beatnik painter...

And then something, or rather, someone happens, and it's that heart-of-gold palooka who winds up saving the girl from rowdy jerks in a swing cafe and, while he's about fifteen years older, their lack of romantic chemistry makes for an endearing friendship the mazy story almost completely settles into, and for once the audience has real human beings to genuinely care about, ramping-up suspense when that aforementioned climax nears.

This is a pretty entertaining movie, proving that the Brits were capable of film noir in the 60's. It has an interesting beatnik/jazz-era vibe more associated with late 50's US films. While it leans toward melodrama, particularly the acting of the beautiful lead actress, it stays true to film noir with its very dark behaviors and outcomes and a pervasive hopelessness. High contrast B&W (or is it just a cheap Sinister Cinema print--but thanks anyway, guys, for making this available!!), jaunty camera angles and nightmarish city images keep it interesting. (Side note: thru Amazon, many obscure noir and thriller titles, probably all public domain, are available in bare bones prints by Sinister Cinema for $8.99 each, a bargain for those interested in such fare.)

Everyone gets into a panic here, except one, who gets all the worst beatings, but at least he knows how to fight back. Janine Grey is a Swiss secretary at a diamond business company and beautiful as such, but unfortunately she has the wrong kind of boy friend, who decides to use her position to make a heist together with two other bandits. The heist fails completely in a blundering fiasco, as the bank manager gets shot to death by one of the villains, who now are wanted for murder, while Janine, knocked unconscious by the robbers when trying to interfere, wakes up in a state of shock with a total amnesia. Her efforts to put her mind together again is not entirely successful, but fortunately she gets a defender at an old shabby café, a former boxer, who still know how to fight. The complications pile up in a tremendous confusion for everyone involved, while gradually the police gets into the mystery to be able to sort it out. The film ends at the top of the confusion, and you can only hope that the general panic gradually will end.

Janine Gray works for a Hatton Gardens jeweler. One evening, her boss asks her to stay late. Two Germans are coming in, and she's bilingual. It turns out they're a couple of crooks associated with her boyfriend. They kill the jeweler, take a big stone, and knock her out. When she comes to, she's in a fugue state, with her memory gone. She goes into hiding, but the police want to find her. So does her boy friend, and his associates. She wanders around, until she runs into Glyn Houston, a boxer on the downslide who takes a fancy to help rescue the damsel in distress.

It's a bit of idiot plotting, strengthened by Miss Gray's uncertainty of what's going on. The acting is solid, but it all could be quickly cleared up, and the police are on the job, and doing a good one. Still, the acting is good, and the camerawork by Geoffrey Faithfull is solid. Faithfull had been a cinematographer for Hepworth back in the silent era, and would work through the end of the 1960s, totaling almost 200 features and shorts in a long career. He died in 1979, aged 86.