Emergency

Emergency ward ten was the first hospital soap on British TV.it was a great success and inspired many limitations including this b feature.a young girl with a rare blood type is knocked down in a road accident.there are only 3 registered donors with her blood type.one is a murderer awaiting execution,the second is an international footballer,and the third is a defecting scientist on the run.Flynn Houston is the detective charged with finding at least one.a fair number of obstacles are put in his way before he finally gets his man.a fairly routine thriller .some car chases and an attempt to liven things up at the end,a bit predictable.

Emergency is a low budget British B movie. A lot of it is interior scenes but is efficiently made.

A little girl is knocked down by a truck and needs a blood transfusion. However she has a rare blood type and only three people are matched.

One of them is a criminal awaiting execution for murder. He would only give blood if he is released. A footballer who is on the verge of playing for England and get his 100th cap. The team manager does not tell him about the emergency as he wants to wait until the match is finished. The final man is a scientist selling secrets who goes on the run when the police call round.

By the way the accident is staged, you are surprised that the little girl is still alive, she should had been killed instantly. The film is a little bit silly, the footballer that the police never contact directly is an example or the dodgy scientists immediately arousing suspicion.

Glyn Houston was never the most versatile of actors but he acquits himself well enough here as the police inspector "Harris" who has to try and track down one of three potential blood donors for a young girl whose only hope of surviving a road accident is an immediate transfusion. It turns out that this search isn't exactly straightforward as one man is already on death row; an other is a reclusive scientist - with a secret he desperately wants to keep - and the third is actually the most decent of the three: a footballer about to play for his 100th England cap. The production is a bit basic, the story a little episodic and contrived at times but Francis Searle manages to keep all three plates in the air for much of this as the tension quickly mounts. Not much jeopardy, no - hardly likely with a little girl lying on an hospital bed in 1962 - but even so, it's still not a bad hour of drama.

Little Candy Pibworth crosses the street when she shouldn't and is struck by a truck. At the hospital Dr. Colin Tapley tells her mother, Zena Walker, that he has to operate immediately. Miss Pibworth, however, has a very rare blood type. There's none in the banks, and only three listed donors. So Inspector Glyn Houston of the CID is the man to track them down and see if they'll save a little girl's life, while her estranged father, Dermot Walsh, actually talks to Miss Walker.

It's a remake of Emergency Call (1952). It's impossible to comment on this without comparing it to the original's, which I found better because of the stories of the three potential donors; here, they're all a bit melodramatic, although there's no denying that Patrick Jordan makes a fine, whiny, anti-social thug facing the gallows. You can slot any number of characters and stories among the potential donors, which is almost certainly why they re-used the format. The result here is a decent time-waster.

EMERGENCY is Francis Searle's remake of the 1952 Lewis Gilbert movie EMERGENCY CALL, about the hunt for a rare blood donor and the situations that arise as a result. The identities and sub-plots surrounding the potential donors have been swapped around a bit, but the central thrust of the story is still the same.

EMERGENCY CALL was made by Nettlefold Films and distributed by Butcher's, whereas this cheaper remake is a Butcher's film through and through. The earlier film was middling, I thought, and this remake is invariably worse thanks to a cheapness of budget and general lack of interest in the crucial sub-plots.

What I did like was the wraparound story, which opens with a shocking accident scene and moves into some tense, emotional, hospital bedside stuff. Glyn Houston is a solid choice for the detective lead, and Dermot Walsh and Zena Walker do their best emoting as the distraught parents. The three sub-plots are weaker, though: the footballer one goes nowhere, the criminal one raises a decent moral dilemma but is a bit staged, and only the scientist-on-the-run tale has any interest.