Within a few years they would both be famous for TV characters.Here they are just jobbing actors.This is a good crime film up to a point but looses its way towards the end.There is no climax.They cut from Jackson about to rough up a gang member for information to everybody congratulating him on what a good job he had done.Its like they have torn pages out of the script.Disappointing.
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malcolmgsw2 October 2017
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Gordon Jackson is an ex-boxer with a prosthetic leg, and sore about it. His wife, Sarah Lawson, still loves him, but his anger and drinking is making things hard on them. His only friend is Warren Mitchell, the little teller at the bank across the way. Little do any of them suspect that the bank is about to be robbed on the next evening it has all the local payrolls, they will come through Miss Lawson's store, and that Jackson and Mitchell will be the police's chief suspects.
It's a decent little programmer from the Danziger Brothers under the direction of Ernest Morris. It's no classic, and the demands of plot and B budgeting will ride this production harder than it should have, with more sentiment and fewer thrills than it should have. The resut is a watchable, although undistinguished little time waster. With Eric Pohlmann and Phillip Saville. -
hwg1957-102-26570414 August 2017The three crooked men of the title use a grocer's shop to break into the bank next door. Getting caught up with the robbery against their will are the grocer who is an embittered ex-boxer and also a bank clerk facing a court appearance for shoplifting. It is a Danziger Brothers' film which means low budget, a few sets and a bit of location photography but this one is quite good. Brian Clemens had a hand in the script and not a minute is wasted though the ending is a bit too rushed.
What lifts the film is the acting. Gordon Jackson as the one legged ex-pugilist seething with self pity, Sarah Lawson as his increasingly angry wife and Eric Pohlmann, Philip Saville and Michael Mellinger as the crooked men who have a kind of sadness about them. They are career criminals looking for the big pay-off. For me Warren Mitchell as Walter Prinn the bank teller is the stand out performance, one of life's underdogs who develops throughout the film very believably. It looks like Dandy Nichols plays Prinn's landlady but she is not credited.
Not a thrill a minute but a good little film. -
richardchatten13 August 2017A Danzigers quickie from the pen of Brian Clemens, creator of 'The Avengers', who creates an ensemble of interesting characters amply done justice by a cast of whom several went on to appear in the TV series. (Philip Saville, who plays 'Seppy', who by then had long given up acting for directing, went one better by actually living with Diana Rigg during the run of the series).
SPOILERS COMING: The title sounds more like a comedy, but it begins conventionally enough with a trio of swarthy, foreign-looking bank robbers arriving in the fictitious town of Riverford with the intention of tunnelling into the local bank through the wall of Gordon Jackson's grocery shop. (Michael Mellinger, who plays the safe-cracker Vince, may be familiar to today's viewers as Goldfinger's henchman Kisch, who later led the rather more ambitious raid on Fort Knox.)
Jackson is carrying a lot of baggage to start with, since he's only got one leg after a road accident, but lightens up considerably after the robbery itself, which is actually over fairly quickly. Again in defiance of the title, the latter part of the film abruptly shifts gear, with the arrest of most of the gang even taking place offscreen. The film instead focuses on Jackson teaming up with bank clerk Warren Mitchell to play detective (rather like the unexpected bond that formed between Bill Elliott and Lucien Littlefield in Hubert Cornfield's 'Sudden Danger') before returning to the arms of his patient wife, played by the perennially handsome & charming Sarah Lawson. -
searchanddestroy-115 March 2009One more Danziger's film, the equivalent of Butcher's ones. B thriller made in UK during 50's and 60's. This one is pleasant, a good time waster.
The topic reminds me Richard Fleisher's VIOLENT Saturday. See for yourself: Three men arrive in a small town to pull the local bank heist. And in that purpose, they have to use the shop that stands besides the bank. They have to break the wall which is on the other side of the safe.
In this story you have some characters such as the shop keeper, a former prize fighter who became a cripple and who lost regards for himself. A loser whose the wife suffers too from her husband's problems. You have the bank clerk, a little man who has his own problems too, because he made a professional mistake. A poor guy who is afraid to lose his job.
You see, all this reminds VIOLENT Saturday.
But the film is rather foreseeable. The ending, even a child could
guess it. A really poor ending, too easy. A very bad climax.
One more point: this movie was written by the great Brian Clemens.