Gefährliche Bonbons

A small boy uses some junk he found in an abandoned garage as the entry fee to a kid's gang. There's a stethoscope, an otoscope, and a tin containing candy.... and cyanide pills. The police are aware the pills are out there, but don't know where they are.

It's an offering from Britain's Children's Film Foundation, an organization dedicated to making wholesome films for children, instead of the filth that Disney offered. Unlike some of them, it's not puerile, with a good structure for suspense, and editing that supports it, but there isn't enough material in the script to make it not seem repetitive, with the police being warned that the pills are out there every five minutes. Look out for Ian Fleming -- no, the other one -- as a doctor.

This is one of the best CFF films. Directed b the experienced Pat Jackson. It contains everything a film of this nature should be. A cast full of existences character actors. Scenes of London when it was rundown and still showing the scars of war. The climax takes place in he long gone Batter sea funfair. With the iconic power station smoking away in the background. I.

I record these CFF films on Talking Pictures TV every Saturday morning and every one is a blast from the past. 1964 looks like 1864 to anyone under 40 years old but for us oldies it brings back happy memories before technology and over indulgent parents stopped children being children. Great acting from all the cast.

This little gem departs from the usual formula of the hero gang being bullied and/or cheated by their rivals.

Here, it's a Race Against Time story with the kids getting possession of "sweets" that are mixed with stolen, poisonous pills.

As with so many of these early (well, at 1964 this is more or less at the end of the golden period) CFF films, the joy-for those around then, and scholars-is seeing post-War London locations with...bomb damage; unsupervised kids all outside; pre-school kids playing on the roadsides, on their own or sometimes under the "care" of their siblings; kids wearing old, conventional clothes, girls in dresses, no American jeans or baseball boots; caves or dens in empty buildings; traffic-free streets; stern but benevolent coppers; a palpable community spirit....

Highly enjoyable and another valuable social document of those times.

(UK's Talking Pictures TV channel has done it again!)

A well above average Children's Film Foundation production similar to Bryanston's production 'The Silent Playground' the same year, combining the plot of 'Bang! You're Dead' with 'Hue and Cry's evocation of a long vanished London of milk floats, police call boxes and ample parking space in the days when the chimneys of Battersea power station still belched smoke and dangerous drugs came in glass jars rather than plastic ones with tamper-proof lids.

Imaginatively shot on location by documentary veteran Pat Jackson, it contains the usual gormless pair of crooks (one played by Warren Mitchell) and familiar faces old (including Ian 'Flemming', sic) and new (today's future sex kitten of the seventies being an almost unrecognisable Sally Thomsett).

Rather harder-edged than the usual CFF fare, it's gang of unkempt young roughnecks hang out in a derelict house with peeling wallpaper and watching them tucking into the tin of sweets laced with strychnine has the same morbid fascination as watching a game of Russian Roulette.