The Traitors

A neat spy thriller set in London and there are a lot of interesting shots of the streets, London in the rain etc. You could almost smell the chlorine in the swimming baths.

Some of these B movies have some dodgy acting, but this is pretty credible throughout. Patrick Crane followed this up with a successful TV series, Crane. He want on to become in demand for his voice overs and narrations.

If the girl in the poster is supposed to be Mary it is not representative of her role in the film.

The second of two British b-crimes pairing lantern-jawed Patrick Allen, honing one of the greatest voices in cinema history, with ingenue Jacqueline Ellis, THE TRAITORS... written by Jim O'Connelly who'd direct Ellis in THE HI-JACKERS the next year... follows the usual spy template popular in the 1960's...

Herein the titular gang of microfilm-carrying turncoats are shadowed by stalwart British agent Allen paired with an American with a British accent in future OTLEY actor James Maxwell...

Allen is married while Maxwell, single, takes Jacqueline Ellis's Mary, as a female agent, on a date, which, sadly, is about the only real screen-time she has, buried by Allen's troubled wife Zena Walker while the action and espionage, with an extremely meager budget, isn't very suspenseful...

The poster has a petrified dame with her mouth covered as Allen's getting pistol-whipped, and neither occurs in this average post-noir that's still an entertaining time-filler, economically filling its sixty-minute programmer's length.

I love black and white films particularly crime dramas which essentially this is. The main draw for me is the realistic use of location and that the locations shown were linked ( bus routes were accurate for example) and not just arbitrary shots of places that are often miles apart.

The drama itself whilst not particularly suspenseful, did show what I suspect most surveillance of spy's and criminals is like, fairly humdrum and probably tedious much of the time. I thought the film had good pace in general and it's always fun spotting well known character actors and those just starting to become known. I was surprised to learn that James Maxwell was American as I thought his accent wasn't that good! I've always thought him to be British! Harold Goodwin injected some warmth and humour into the film whilst Zena Walker's character was, I think, unnecessary.

Overall I think it's a good film an worth a watch. Those who recognise the locations will enjoy spotting land marks they know, for others it's a snapshot of what working class London of the early 1960's was like. Most of the locations have now been gentrified and the houses within these gritty streets contain homes now worth up to a million or more!

Although some may find the film slow to get going, this is often the way of real life counter intelligence work.

My copy was paired with the Wind of change film, I have watched Trtitors a few times and it is a pacey film, a few of the 'faces' from the 60's and 70's turn up, actors like Geoffrey Segal and Patrick Allen for example.

The black and white does give the air of 'old' film and does lend atmosphere to the mainly London locations. It is an intelligently scripted film, directed by Robert Tronson, later to direct Bergerac episodes for TV.

If you've not seen the Portland Spies film, then that is also another great film in the same type of interest, Portland being based on a true story.

All things considered, budget, script and behind the camera this is a good film.

It's one of those old B pictures with a lot of location shooting in London, which now makes for rather more compelling viewing than the film itself (which is very similar in feel and treatment to Sidney Lumet's altogether superior "The Deadly Affair" from five years later).

The cinema which features extensively and in which one of the spies meets his end is neither of those mentioned in previous reviews. It is actually the Grange Cinema on High Street KIlburn, dating from 1914 and Grade II listed, as a result of which is therefore still there, albeit now functioning, as so many do, as a third-world evangelical church.