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MovieMail's Review
This hard-hitting 1950s crime drama is thought-provoking and stylish, remaining a valid exposé of racial inequality in the capital, says Alexander Ballinger.
When the bloodied corpse of the eponymous Sapphire (Yvonne Buckingham) winds up on Hampstead Heath it’s anything but a straightforward murder case for Superintendent Hazard (Nigel Patrick) and his bigoted sidekick (Michael Craig). On discovering that the mixed-race Sapphire has been passing herself off as white to get ahead in prejudiced London society their enquiries plunge them into the dark heart of a racially divided London and her fiancé’s corrosive middle-class family.
This is a thought-provoking and stylish example of the social problem films pioneered by the director/producer team of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph from the mid-1940s onwards, a creative partnership too often overshadowed by the colourful collaborations of their British contemporaries, Powell and Pressburger and Launder and Gilliat.
Released hot on the heels of the incendiary 1958 Notting Hill race riots Sapphire succeeds – aided by Johnny Dankworth’s unsettling saxophone and Harry Waxman’s explosive use of Eastmancolor – in being both a gripping account of an unravelling murder investigation and an all-too prescient exposé of racial inequality in the capital.
Hard-hitting 1950s crime drama exploring racism towards immigrants among the London police and public.
Sapphire (Yvonne Buckingham), a fair-skinned West Indian immigrant, is discovered murdered. To the police, led by Superintendent Hazard (Nigel Patrick) and Inspector Learoyd (Michael Craig), the case seems clear cut - Sapphire must have been killed by a member of the black community.
However, when Sapphire's brother (Earl Cameron) turns up at the police station and Sapphire's true ethnic roots become known, Hazard and Learoyd must face up to the racism of two communities and, quite possibly, their own.
