Danger by My Side

I usually love the black-and-white crime drama programmers from England in the late 50's and early 60's, but this one is thinner than most. At times it seems like the plot is merely the excuse to have half-naked girls dancing about on a tiny stage for inordinately long periods of time. Maureen Connell is actually pretty good in the lead as the sister of a murdered undercover cop. She goes undercover herself to work in the bad guy's club to try and find out about the usual 'big job'. (The club has all the half-naked girls dancing around singing songs like "DANGER BY MY SIDE".) She just about stumbles on all the clues and the bad guys stumble on the fact that she's a stoolie for the cops and the cops stumble on the bad guys at the end. The End. Passes the time, but directors like Montgomery Tully did a much better job of this kind of thing.

An implausible story line, but I enjoyed watching this for the 1960s vibe. Interesting shots of 1960s interiors and a trendy coffee bar. It was bang on for Profumo affair background: voluptuous beauties in naughty outfits partially disrobing with laughably artistic pretensions. I imagine this was the clubland inhabited by Mandy Rice Davies and Christine Keeler.

DANGER BY MY SIDE is an acceptable British film noir from low budget studios Butcher's Films. It's a film where the paucity of the budget is always apparent, but this doesn't stop the writer from delivering a surprisingly fast-paced little effort that centres around a gang of diamond thieves and their connection to a sleazy Soho nightclub.

The film opens effectively with a well-staged robbery, then plays out a murder scene which is unexpected to say the least; a sort of spin on Janet Leigh's death in PSYCHO. From this point, the surprisingly decent Maureen Connell takes the lead as a woman who makes it her job to go undercover to catch the men responsible. Larger-than-life women pad out the cast here, always proving more memorable than their male counterparts.

Although this is an entirely low rent affair with little action or incident to remember it by, it does have a good atmosphere and the Soho-set scenes are effective to say the least. It also has the old cliché of filming dancing/stripping women as a way to pad out the running time, a device beloved of American producers since the 1970s. Although there are next to no familiar faces in this one, DANGER BY THE SIDE is perfectly acceptable fare for those who like this sort of thing.

Caught this on Talking Pictures. A truly ludicrous and comedic plot, where a member of the public does all the police work for them, by going undercover in a gangs operation/nightclub.

Whilst maintaining phone contact with the police, obviously back then the police had a very laissez-faire attitude to undercover work carried out by the public.

One of the truly memorable quotes in the police/undercover phone conversations : "you're not old enough to be my father" "cheeky, I'll put over my knee and spank your bottom"

When her brother, an undercover policeman, gets run down by a car, his sister, Maureen Connell, wants justice. Detective Inspector Anthony Oliver says there are no leads, so Miss Connell offers to investigate on her own. Oliver takes her up, with the understanding she'll report any leads to him. She quickly discovers that everything points to a night club run by the usual villains.

It's a cheap second feature that doesn't run a full hour, and director Charles Saunders can't bring much to it. He had had a good career, first as an editor, then as a director since 1943, where he proved himself capable of turning out good programmers, but this was his last credit; retired from the movies and television at age 58, although he lived to be 92.

This being the 1960s, the lingering remnants of the censor and film noir appear with a couple of strippers at the club who never show anything strategic.