The Shakedown DVD, 1960

With John Lemont's The Shakedown (which the director made from a screenplay he had written with Leigh Vance in 1959), some provocative notions were wrung from a famili... more >

With John Lemont's The Shakedown (which the director made from a screenplay he had written with Leigh Vance in 1959), some provocative notions were wrung from a familiar scenario, with a piquant leavening of exploitation elements: a con released from prison attempting to reclaim the prostitution racket he once ran from a slimy successor. Terence Morgan (as the ill-fated maverick up against a more unpleasant opponent) delivers a fairly standard performance, but this is one of those British B-movies whose interesting backup cast more than makes up for maladroit execution, and now seems far more cherishable than in the film's heyday: a nicely underplayed performance by Donald Pleasance as a down-on-his luck photographer set up by Morgan in a studio as part of a blackmail scheme, Hammer Films stalwart Hazel Court providing glacial sexuality, and Harry H. Corbett chewing the scenery as Morgan's ruthless usurper. Like many films of the period (such as Michael Powell's Peeping Tom), The Shakedown samples the world of sleazy erotica and fairly decorous late-1950s nude pinups (though there is nudity here, unusual for the era). Inter alia, the film freights in some interesting comments about polite society's complaisance with the less salubrious elements that offered once-a-week entertainment (with catchpenny moralising overlay) in the Sunday papers, though the Soho depicted here is less persuasively sleazy than in the same team's superior Piccadilly Third Stop. < less

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