Emergency Call

EMERGENCY CALL is a film that takes an old premise, involving a sick and ailing child who desperately needs to be saved by a transfusion of rare blood, and uses it as a basis for a film which explores working class life in London in the early 1950s. It's an intriguing little portrait of its time, depicting a bygone era populated by racial tension, corrupt boxing promoters, and criminals desperately trying to cover up their past crimes. The film is episodic in nature and hampered by the constraints of a low budget, but not without interest for fans of the genre.

The cast includes Jack Warner (TV's DIXON OF DOCK GREEN) playing, you guessed, a policeman, and real-life boxing champ Freddie Mills playing, well, a boxer. There are also roles for those who would achieve later fame, including Thora Hird and Sid James. The film shrugs off the social commentary about two thirds of the way in, ending up as a police procedural thriller with an effective climax. Not great, but there's still plenty of interest here.

Joy Shelton brings her young daughter, Jennifer Tafler, to the hospital. The child is dying of a rare form of leukemia. She needs a complete transfusion or she will die in barely more than four days. Unfortunately, she has an even rarer blood type. There are only three people in Britain who have the same blood type. One is Freddie Mills, a has-been boxer who disappeared after his manager, Sid James, told him to take a dive. The second is Earl Cameron (still alive in his 102nd year as I write this), a seaman who refuses to give his blood. The third is Geoffrey Hibbert, wanted for murder and in hiding. Jack Warner is the Scotland Yard inspector leading the search. He says it's a nice change from his usual murder beat.

It's a well-made movie, with the professionals all doing their jobs calmly, and the laity showing flares of temperament as Miss Tafler, whose father, Sydney Tafler, has a sizable role, sinks towards death. There is mordant humor to take the audience's mind off the impending tragedy: Henry Hewitt, whose wife is identified as one of the possible donors; he does not realize she is dead. Eric Pohlman and Thora Hird are on hand, welcome faces in this drama. Sometimes the police are trying to help the living..... something the gangsters and fishwives (Miss Hird runs a chippie!) don't always recognize.

Competent if slightly stodgy (and now rather dated) British B-movie. The plot centres around a child critically ill in hospital who needs a blood transfusion to save her life. Unfortunately she has a rare blood group, so Scotland yard are called in to track down possible donors. This is used as a framework for a collection of little stories about life in London ca 1950 rather in the style of "The Blue Lamp". Jack Warner and Sid James as a boxing manager (who could be a decent character actor when he tried) do a reasonable job at keeping the plot afloat. Now mainly of interest as a social document.

Archetypal film that shows post war Britain as it is understood by those of us who grew up with Dixon of Dock Green, Freddie Mills, Sydney Tafler and Sid James writing our scripts. Wonderful stuff with a conclusion we know will be solved just before the film ends, so we can all go to bed knowing that all is right with the world and we are being protected by our new NHS and police force who do no wrong.

Such a shame we learnt the truth by the eighties by which time we had grown up and discovered how complex the world really is, but oh how we can recall the kindly usherette showing us to our seats in a darkened cinema as we all felt part of the same Britain for just an hour and a half before the new Queen was crowned. Wonderful evocative stuff or a load of old clap trap depending on your take on the world?

You can't get much closer to reality than in describing and recounting the circumstances and very critical instances in the emergency of having a very short time to save a child's life with the rarest possible blood group, for which three donors are needed, and the difficulties in getting them in time are constantly towering here, even mounting to criminal complications and crooked business in the field of boxing. The realism is total, the film is aptly scripted with impressing accuracy from both the views of the hospital and Scotland Yard, and the human destinies involved are gripping, especially the last one, a compromised case of innocence. The acting is equally superb, no one is overacting, everyone is natural and neutral, and they are all on equal footing. There are many films like this from England around these years, and they are generally all reliable and impeccably realistic, like Italian neorealism, no matter how prominent actors are in them. This is better and more exciting than most thrillers, and yet it is all fictional, but the reality is too convincing not to raise a certainty with the viewer that it must all be taken more or less directly from reality.