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MovieMail's Review
Given that the auteur theory (with its primacy of director over screenwriter, actors, etc.) has being undergoing some revisionist attention in recent years, an affirmation of the creed may frequently be found within the neglected byways of the British B Film, in which a director of imagination and distinction can utilise precisely those elements available to his less talented colleagues (shopworn screenplay, efficient (if familiar) actors and the standard studio facilities available to all his peers) and produce work of a far more idiosyncratic quality. The director Wolf Rilla, though born in Germany, produced much accomplished work in the British film industry, with an unquestionable career apogee in his adaptation of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (as Village of the Damned) in 1960, which demonstrated that a fierce intelligence and a mastery of the orchestration of film tension. If these qualities are more fitfully evident in his film Piccadilly Third Stop (made in the same year), a comparison with other films made by similar production companies instantly demonstrates the quantum leap in the quality achieved over product from other studio. The writer and journalist Leigh Vance had worked with Piccadilly Third Stop's producer Norman Williams on films set in the criminal world of Soho, The Shakedown (once again, made in the year 1960), which has its virtues - not least in the attempts to deal honestly with the milieu and denizens of this world. However, that film's director, John Lemont, was (at best) a journeyman technician, unlike Wolf Rilla, who was hired to work on another Vance/Williams project, and Piccadilly Third Stop was to be by far the more memorable piece of work, despite its obvious limitations.
While the thick-ear gangster types of Soho in the 1950s are represented here, director and screenwriter are far more interested in the scrabbling for money by a picture of decayed upper-class figures living on their wits and sporting an easy amorality predicated on their unquestioned sense of superiority and contempt, both for those lower down the social scale - and for the easy pickings to be found in their own class. The charming if morally bankrupt protagonist here is Dominic, alternating between an enjoyment of the sybaritic lifestyle involving a succession of sexually available women (all of whom are treated in a casually misogynist fashion, and used for whatever they can provide for Dominic's crooked schemes - such as the casually utilised lover (played by Mai Zetterling, moving from Ingmar Bergman films to the sleazier world of the British 'b' picture), married to a violent and unstable smuggler, and the naive Chinese girl played by Yoko Charlie who provides entrance - after a heartless seduction ('You won't respect me!') - to the safe of her father's embassy).
More than many British films, Wolf Rilla and screenwriter Vance are prepared to present a character who has virtually no redeeming features - the audience scrutinises Dominic for one action will redeem his strictly utilitarian view of other human beings, but Rilla is simply not interested in providing such banal excuses. However, it is not just Terence Morgan's ruthless performance as Domini that fascinates, but the always excellent Dennis Price as the owner of a roulette club who is also an upper-class fence, and who takes the Dominic character's uppercrust contempt for those he is taking to the cleaners to even more rarefied levels. If Morgan is granted at least a certain self-contempt for his unedifying lifestyle, the character played by Price, is completely at ease with the venal lifestyle he enjoys. The services he provides for his equally well-heeled colleagues, is in the nature of a gentleman's agreement, but the protocol is clear: however criminal the enterprise, the officer-class gloss is maintained by the threat of strong-arm thuggery from his thuggish enforcer.
The film builds towards a tensely staged robbery of an embassy that demonstrates Rilla had been looking at a variety of American models, but his is as crisply directed and edited as the equally pulse-accelerating climax of Village of the Damned. What follows the robbery, however, is one of the bleakest endings in British crime film (circumventing the 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned' resolution we have been led to expect) - the days when Old Testament morality was shaken loose from the crime film were some years in the future but still carries a considerable force in its unsparingness. Willa was given larger budget for his succeeding film, The World Ten Times Over, two years later, but did not produce work that was pleasing to either audience or critics, and his last few films in the exploitation vein were sad shadows of his accomplished earlier work. But on the strength of films such as Piccadilly Third Stop, Wolf Rilla deserves a place in the pantheon of the most adroit directors of British crime films.
Wolf Rilla (Village of the Damned) directed this 1960 UK production, Piccadilly Third Stop, which features Terence Morgan at his oiliest as a playboy petty thief looking for the big time.
When Dominic (Terence Morgan) seduces Fina (Yoko Tani), the daughter of a Far Eastern ambassador, he is pleased to learn that her father keeps a large amount of cash in his embassy's safe. With a team that includes the smuggler Preedy (John Crawford) and the safe-cracker Colonel Whitfield (William Hartnell), Dominic puts together a plan to break into the embassy and rob the safe, but will he pull it off? The music by Phillip Green is 60s jazz which adds some great period atmosphere.
