Peril for the Guy

Courtesy again from UK's Talking Pictures channel.

Some of the cast reappeared in the later "The Salvage Gang" (1958).

Empty streets, bomb site dens, kids using their initiative, friendly (but incompetent) coppers, absent parents (replaced by a professor), a nasty crooked gang of adults (with a slight suggestion of Cold War skulduggery)....it's all here.

Interesting to see how Bonfire Night was the event then, not Halloween. I well remember how we all could buy fireworks with minimal effort and supervision; one of our favourites was the Banger, and some of us had "banger guns"-a piece of curved pipe with a "touch hole"-the banger was inserted fuse first, lit via the touch hole, then pointed at a mate! We all survived.

Interesting, too, to see the Asian kid-Ali-here as well as in the later film; "inclusion" and "diversity" featured a fair bit in these CFF productions but it was natural-not forced and embarrassing like the increasingly laughable BBC and others come across when they get on the latest fashionable bandwagon.

A good quality production in all areas with many recognisable actors that will have us reaching for our film directories or the search engine...

Another charming adventure from the Children's Film Foundation. This time a gang of kids is out to foil the plans of a sinister oil 'baron' and his goons, who they discover have kidnapped Prof. Picton PhD, the slick-haired inventor of an ingenious and much prized oil-detector device. The baron himself is of the old school, with his cut glass accent and manor house bedecked with suits of armour and oak panelled walls hiding secret doors - just the place for good old fashioned skullduggery!

Like other films from the Foundation this a ripping yarn told well, with great performances from the child leads. It's not a tale with much emotional power-unlike for example 'Johnny on the Run', another CFF film made 3 years prior-but it skips along at a jaunty pace with the kids getting into all sorts of amusing scrapes and taking every opportunity to tussle with the baddies. All in all a slight and enjoyable tale of kids (hooray!) defeating the baddies (boo!), with only a little help from the mostly dithering adults. Special mention too for Geoffrey Wright's playful score which adds much to the gentle silliness of this warm hearted film.

Great yarn for kids, or at least it was at one time....! I remember watching these CFF films as a kid around the late 60's and I still enjoyed watching it again.... I remember the excitement with wanting the film to end (Whilst still wanting to see the end!) so we could get out and do similar japes.... Go kart made from pram wheels and orange boxes and playing around bombed out buildings and wasteland... and even then still playing around wreckage of the odd German plane in some of the woods .... making camps and playing the heroes!

It was also good to watch adult actors in these CFF films that your parents would know from the movies they watched.... so looking back I never saw these movies as 'cheap' or 'half done' because of the target audience, indeed the quality was equal to the older audience films of the day.... and anyone from a later generation watching these should remember that this is just how kids were back then and we loved it.... ! Penny for the guy..? Though I don't think any kids today would know that we once celebrated November 5th in the way we see here.... Halloween never existed as we see it today and it was November 5th that was the big Bonfire Night... when we would set fire to our guys on the local field or park and watch the fireworks with sparklers.... back then we could buy fireworks or a lot of them ourselves....! I still think kids back then were more mature than we see today.... even though some say kids grow up quickly today I don't think they are as well educated or mature as the kids back then.... but this film is a great adventure from a long gone era...!

Every year just before Guy Fawkes night there would be kids with a guy asking "penny for the guy" Then there are the empty streets of Hampstead. What a contrast to today.

A great CFF film.

Talking Pictures' Saturday morning pictures' at the moment are showing a great program of films from Children's Film Foundation. A must for us Baby Boomers. In glorious black and white.

Peril for the guy is about 1hr long. With beautiful scenes of misty morning streets with hardly a car in sight. With a nice friendly policeman to keep you safe and find a penny for you. You can learn about £, shillings and pence too Lovely child actors who went on to long film and TV careers.

Just right to show social history to the grand children.

I can remember children pouncing on me as I got of the bus on smoggy evenings yelling 'penny for the Gus miss' in the 1960s.