Ambush in Leopard Street

AMBUSH IN LEOPARD STREET is an ultra-low budget British crime thriller in which a gang of crooks gather together to plan the perfect robbery. This must be one of the lowest budgeted films ever as almost the whole film takes place in a couple of rooms with the characters jawing away. The robbery, when it finally takes place in the last section, is also entirely lacklustre and lacking in impact.

Of course, a low budget doesn't necessarily mean poor quality, but that is the case here. The problem with AMBUSH IN LEOPARD STREET is that nothing much really happens and there aren't even any of the regular British faces to enjoy in the cast list. The best 'star' the film can muster is Michael Brennan (who played the pub landlord in LUST FOR A VAMPIRE and appeared in a string of bit parts throughout the '60s and '70s) but the rest of the faces were unknown to me and their acting hardly of note.

The only thing the film has going for it is a sudden and unexpected moment of violence towards the climax but even that's brief and not handled as well as you'd expect. Still, for nostalgic fans of mid-century British fare, AMBUSH IN LEOPARD STREET does provide a nice snapshot of the fashions, attitudes and long-forgotten streets of the day.

Only one of the previous reviewers picks up on the fact that this film was made at Ardmore Studios in Ireland, and even he doesn't mention that most of the cast are Irish too (including Marie Conmee, who stood in for Burt Lancaster as the hunt saboteur a couple of years later in 'The List of Adrian Messenger'), along with the locations, which don't look like London.

Despite the tinny sound and frequently mismatched shots, quite a few of the cast (along with cameraman Stephen Dade, not that you'd know it from his work on this) are familiar from more prestigious films, notably Norman Rodway, who a few years later was playing Hotspur for Orson Welles in 'Chimes at Midnight'.

James Kenney in the lead was a regular in British films of the fifties, and is here required to pretend he likes classical music in order to lure lonely spinster Jean Harvey into the gang's orbit, in one of several melancholy subplots that the film throws in the viewers' path.

This is a really pretty mediocre heist drama that offers little more than a vehicle for cute James Kenney (always "Mr. Longleyyyy" to me) as a young man ("Johnny") who is assigned the task of schmoozing a woman who works for some diamond dealers, so he can help his sister's boyfriend and his pals to rob the place. The robbery itself is almost incidental to a plot that is as weak as yesterday's tea leaves and the story has a certain, melodramatic, inevitability about it that makes it quite a dull watch that the title flatters to deceive... Lower end of the B-movie scale, this one that you'll soon forget.

It's a well-planned job to steal half a million quid in diamonds -- mastermind Bruce Seton has arranged to sell it for a hundred grand -- and it looks like it should go very well. Part of the plan calls for James Kenney to romance the jeweler's secretary, Jean Harvey. He's a good-looking youngster, no record, a retiring manner, and brother-in-law of Michael Brennan, part of the small gang. However, another, larger, more dangerous mob have gotten wind of it.

It has an obnoxious score, but everyone looks right, and they're good enough actors to keep this cheap second feature moving right along. I looked at a 55-minute version. This means that 17 minutes were cut from the original, probably to fit it into a TV one-hour slot; this probably erased some needed explanations, and probably character development, but the story moves like lightning.