The Informers

I love these sort of films,1950s/1960s British crime films. Some are well known but this one is fairly obscure,despite the well known director and cast.

So I was glad when I caught this on a film channel. It has its faults,mainly sometimes unrealistic,but it is well made and has a great cast. 10 years after this film was made the British film industry was almost dead,why? I think because of tv and the idea that British films were dull,some were but some were great.

Firstly the location of Johnoes house was in North End Road Golders Green Green.It stars one of my favourite actors in Nigel Patrick and villains in Darren Nesbitt.I saw the film at the Odeon Temple Fortune on 24th November 1964.I would make the point that so many detectives at Scotland Yard at the time were corrupt they didn't need to frame them.I enjoyed the film then and now with reservations as I felt ,and still do that the climax is very contrived.By the performances of the dog and cat were noteworthy!

No matter what title's used, UNDERWORLD INFORMERS or simply THE INFORMERS, it's right up front about those shady characters desperate enough to run to the law and name names...

Only here it's Scotland Yard's Nigel Patrick who takes foot after them... one snitch/snout in particular in a newly-slain informer's hard-working ex-con brother Colin Blakely, so intensely energetic he needed far more screen time...

But it's pretty boy criminal Derren Nesbitt on the freewheeling forefront, strutting his wealth as he and more cautious partner Frank Finlay hang in a crowded nightclub while their planned bank heist (after several previous knockoffs) occurs simultaneously elsewhere...

So Nigel Patrick's Chief Inspector John Edward Johnnoe... vulnerable to strict chief Harry Andrews since he cuts corners to begin with... dives into a dog-eat-dog plot saturated enough for three crime flicks while curbed by two dames that, like any Noir, has one naive the other wicked.

Unfortunately the gorgeous Katherine Woodville is benign and underused as the cop's wife, leaving the good stuff to bad girl/moll Margaret Whiting who, despite framing our hero, is equally sympathetic as a single mom mentally and physically abused by that rich pompous crime lord Nesbitt...

Who really has the most fun since, unlike everyone else... dizzy from all the complicated bedlam... he's grinning till the end, and with an unapologetic villainy that -- possibly inspired by the likes of Robinson and Cagney -- becomes downright infectious.

Surprisingly, one of the best tough-cop performances in a British film came from Nigel Patrick in "The Informers," an actor who has considerably more strength in this kind of role than all those witty, urbane characters in which he has found himself would seem to suggest...

Patrick played a detective-sergeant with a genuine London accent and showed a fierceness towards a gang of crooks which at the time (1963) was highly unusual in British pictures… It could be that the characterization was in a direct line from his Soho racketeer in "The Noose ( 1948), his cold-hearted spymaster in "Count Five and Die,"( 1958) and his police detective in "Sapphire" (1959). Somewhere inside Nigel Patrick, it seems, there is a Sterling Hayden trying to break out

At least for this period; because you know better than me that during the late fifties and early sixties, there were hundreds - maybe not thousands - of short black and white crime movies, mostly produced by Butchers or Danziger's companies, and a few other ones too. Most of them, the bulk of this huge batch are forgettable, only a few emerge from my memory; I have seen so many of them. Some are excellent, for instance Sidney Hayer's' PAYROLL or Cliff Owen's PRIZE OF ARMS. No one can miss LEAGUE OF THE GENTLEMEN, light hearted though. This one is excellent because adapted from a Douglas Warner's novel, also terrific story, but maybe a bit old fashioned from today's standards. It is a shame that no more novels of this author were put on screen, big or small.