Produced in the year after The Blue Lamp (1950), Pool of
London shares similar thematic and narrative interests in criminal gangs (a
jewellery heist in this case), car chases and delinquency. Although produced by
the same team (Basil Dearden and Michael Relph), this film features little of
the jovial camaraderie of P.C. Dixon and his colleagues, and feels more like
the team’s effort to make a harder-edge crime drama, perhaps even influenced by
some of the post-war American crime thrillers that were subsequently dubbed film noir. Yet despite some impressive
stylistic touches, and an unusual setting, Pool
of London is most noticeable for its attempt to blend together different
issues and narrative ideas, leading to occasionally jarring shifts in tone and
structure.
Dan MacDonald (Bonar Colleano) and Johnny Lambert (Earl
Cameron) are shipmates on the Dunbar, a boat recently docked next to London’s Tower
Bridge. Dan is the wide boy petty smuggler (nylons, cigarettes) while the more
morally upright black sailor Johnny is his best friend; Dan has a girl in port
(possibly every port), Maisie (Moira Lister), while Johnny tends to avoid the
city, sure that beyond its gleaming surface it is ‘filth, squalor, misery.’ Yet
on this trip he meets and begins a tentative relationship with Pat (Susan
Shaw). Meanwhile, Dan agrees to smuggle stolen goods from London to Amsterdam
for Vernon (Max Adrian) and Alf (Alfie Bass), and he and Johnny get caught between
a murderous criminal heist and a Scotland Yard manhunt.
While that description doesn’t encapsulate the full range
of tangential elements within the film, it already begins to point up the dense
nature of what the film is attempting to combine. First, there is documentary
footage of the London docks (according to Barr, the film arose out of a
documentary project) butted up against several sequences of stylised
chiaroscuro lighting; there is the dramatic material of the heist and murder
next to the comic presence of Dunbar’s chief engineer (James Robertson
Justice), who alternately drinks, sleeps, reads poetry, and yells at the crew;
there is the sexual attitudes of the shipmates to their women compared to
Johnny’s burgeoning relationship with Pat (largely developed by her); and there
is the film’s attempt to comment on race relations through different characters
assumptions and attitudes towards Johnny. Throw in Vernon’s acrobatic criminal,
cat fights between Maisie and her sister Pamela (Joan Dowling), Dan sleeping
with shipmate Harry’s girl Sally (Renee Asherson), and a series of fast-paced
car chases, and the film is constantly on the verge of tipping over into
incoherence.
There are points where it loses that sense of balance,
and it is unclear what direction the film wants to head in: this is most clear
in the desire to pursue the heist and Johnny and Pat’s day out in London at the
same time. There is little direct relationship between the two storylines (the
main element is that, while on St. Paul’s roof, Pat spots Vernon on the roof of
a building nearby), but the film intercuts between them, as though trying to
suggest some thematic connection that simply doesn’t arise. Even the music in
these sequences is different: stronger, dramatic work over the heist and
murder; lighter, romantic for Pat and Johnny. Both sequences work in their own
right – Earl Cameron’s performance as Johnny is strong, presenting a man who
has no real home and whose skin colour means most people will not accept him
(rejecting Pat’s notion that it doesn’t matter how or where people are born,
but equally thoughtful as to what colour God is); and the heist is expertly cut
together (there is a great visual trick with an unclaimed bottle of milk that
pays off through the scene) – but this is the point where the film most
obviously feels most like two different stories that happen to share the same
space.
Yet while that portmanteau quality works in Dead of Night (1945) or Train of Events (1949), here there is a
sense that everything has to be connected – the diamonds from the heist are in
the package Johnny agrees to take on the ship for Dan – but those links are
never consistent beyond the level of narrative requirement. Equally, the race
issues the film obviously wants to engage with – which form a solid bond with Dearden’s
later film Sapphire (1957) – don’t
lead anywhere, and tell us very little about the characters who indulge in such
casual racism (such as Maisie, theatre guard, the police), or Johnny himself,
the victim of it. Cameron and Colleano are called upon to do most of the
dramatic heavy lifting throughout, and it is a shame to see Moira Lister (who
was impressive in 1948s Another Shore)
reduced to a shrill and mannered performance as working class Maisie.
What sticks in my mind after watching the film is its
visual style: there are beautifully composed shots of the docks, mainly at
night, well-shot shadowy streets and morally dubious characters (Maisie and Dan
are often bathed in shadow, with bars of light across their face); the images
of a deserted Sunday morning in the City of London (and the bombed out areas, a
notable characteristic of Ealing films from Hue
and Cry (1947) on) create a strong background for the heist, occurring in
the shadow of St. Pauls; while the final atmospheric car chase through Rotherhithe
tunnel is also a highlight, a set piece that feels almost Hitchcockian, as
Vernon clambers (acrobatically) over a domed air vent and ends up falling from
a pipe into the tunnel below. But ultimately, the film never feels as coherent
or as powerful as the sum of its parts.
[Pool of London
is released by Studio Canal, see
www.studiocanal.co.uk for more details]
Next time, the sport of kings takes centre stage in The Rainbow Jacket (1954)...
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