Seventy Deadly Pills

A group of working class kids formed a group they call the Rockets. They use an empty tenement as their clubhouse. They collect and swap junk they find. One day they come across dangerous pills that cane from a doctors car that was stolen by adults.

Since the pills can be confused for candy, a dragnet is put out to try and find out who has them, as well as notifying the public.

If you are expecting an urban Lord of the Flies you will be disappointed. The kids are mostly civil.

This should be quite a treat for young people to see. The kids have no computer games, no internet and for the most part run free and safe throughout the city. Not now.

This little gem departs from the usual formula of the hero gang being bullied and/or cheated by their rivals.

Here, it's a Race Against Time story with the kids getting possession of "sweets" that are mixed with stolen, poisonous pills.

As with so many of these early (well, at 1964 this is more or less at the end of the golden period) CFF films, the joy-for those around then, and scholars-is seeing post-War London locations with...bomb damage; unsupervised kids all outside; pre-school kids playing on the roadsides, on their own or sometimes under the "care" of their siblings; kids wearing old, conventional clothes, girls in dresses, no American jeans or baseball boots; caves or dens in empty buildings; traffic-free streets; stern but benevolent coppers; a palpable community spirit....

Highly enjoyable and another valuable social document of those times.

(UK's Talking Pictures TV channel has done it again!)

A well above average Children's Film Foundation production similar to Bryanston's production 'The Silent Playground' the same year, combining the plot of 'Bang! You're Dead' with 'Hue and Cry's evocation of a long vanished London of milk floats, police call boxes and ample parking space in the days when the chimneys of Battersea power station still belched smoke and dangerous drugs came in glass jars rather than plastic ones with tamper-proof lids.

Imaginatively shot on location by documentary veteran Pat Jackson, it contains the usual gormless pair of crooks (one played by Warren Mitchell) and familiar faces old (including Ian 'Flemming', sic) and new (today's future sex kitten of the seventies being an almost unrecognisable Sally Thomsett).

Rather harder-edged than the usual CFF fare, it's gang of unkempt young roughnecks hang out in a derelict house with peeling wallpaper and watching them tucking into the tin of sweets laced with strychnine has the same morbid fascination as watching a game of Russian Roulette.

A small boy uses some junk he found in an abandoned garage as the entry fee to a kid's gang. There's a stethoscope, an otoscope, and a tin containing candy.... and cyanide pills. The police are aware the pills are out there, but don't know where they are.

It's an offering from Britain's Children's Film Foundation, an organization dedicated to making wholesome films for children, instead of the filth that Disney offered. Unlike some of them, it's not puerile, with a good structure for suspense, and editing that supports it, but there isn't enough material in the script to make it not seem repetitive, with the police being warned that the pills are out there every five minutes. Look out for Ian Fleming -- no, the other one -- as a doctor.

This is one of the best CFF films. Directed b the experienced Pat Jackson. It contains everything a film of this nature should be. A cast full of existences character actors. Scenes of London when it was rundown and still showing the scars of war. The climax takes place in he long gone Batter sea funfair. With the iconic power station smoking away in the background. I.