The Heart Within

A murder suspect, played by Earl Cameron, is a West Indian immigrant who must depend for help on white Londoners. It's an early attempt to deal with the racial tensions provoked by the influx of immigrants to Britain from less affluent parts of the former British Empire after the second world war. Child actor David Hemmings, as Danny, easily outshines most of the other characters.

A man has been murdered and the police want to get their hands on Earl Cameron, who quarreled with the victim shortly before. He's disappeared, and when street kid David Hemmings runs across him, intends to stay that way. When he had first come to London from the West Indies, he trusted everyone. Now he trusts no one, not even David Hemmings, who promises to bring him food.

Half procedural mystery, half indictment of race relations, the remarkable thing about this movie is the assured performance of Hemmings. He was fifteen when he made this movie, but he looks and acts much younger. The cast is filled out with other well know British actors, like James Hayter as Hemmings' grandfather, and the script by John Baxter and Geoffrey Orme makes its points without belaboring the issues. The result is a complicated and important film masquerading as a simple one.

I saw the dvd of this in the British Film Institute shop and it looked good.

I wondered why I had never heard of it.

I sound found out why it is unknown.

It is a kids film only 60 minutes long.

I like mix of black and white actors but there is little location shooting.

Of historical interest only in my opinion.

John Baxter had written socially concerned films since the 1930s, which found late expression in this artefact of that time long ago when West Indians were described as 'coloureds' and calypso rather than ska or reggae was used on the soundtrack to denote their otherness; while the police showed how broad-minded they were by declaring "If had my way I'd send them all back!"

Earl Cameron plays the man on the run after being wrongly accused of killing a narcotics dealer, who along the way encounters a cute little tyke in the form of a young David Hemmings.