The Six Men

If you like blues piano there are some good close-up shots on the bar scenes.

The first - and last - feature film made by a director with a background in public information films. This comprises a vividly photographed, tongue-in-cheek Edgar Wallace pastiche obviously swiftly polished off on half a shoestring depicting the downfall of a gang of six criminals engineered by Scotland Yard detective Harold Warrender.

THE SIX MEN is a low rent British crime film that suffers from a lack of incident and characters that you can't really warm to. It does benefit from an atypical storyline in which the six members of a criminal gang are the protagonists and the film follows their misadventures as they find themselves captured and carted off to jail one by one.

There's some mild suspense raised as to who the mysterious figure is who is orchestrating the arrests, but to be fair it's never really that gripping and you could turn this off ten minutes before the end and be forever none the wiser without too much bother (the eventual resolution is hurried and makes you shrug your shoulders in response). THE SIX MEN is the kind of film to keep you watching but it's something you'll forget about too shortly afterwards. The cast is undistinguished and lacks the usual familiar faces from the era. The only bits I really enjoyed were the goofy, randomly-inserted scenes of humour involving the bumbling detective who gets his stick trapped in the grill and suffers other indignities as the running time goes on.

A group of six villains led by Mastermind Peter Bull has been baffling Scotland Yard for years. However, someone is following them around, leading them into temptation and knocking them off one by one, as Harold Wallender's assistant, Michael Evans catches them in the act, when he's not busy pursuing beautiful actress Olga Edwardes.

With dialogue that sounds like it's from a boy's newspaper, a frenetic score by Hans Gunther Stumpf, and lighting by cameraman S. D. Onions that throws dramatic shadows on the bare walls of underdecorated sets, it's the model of a quota quickie that doesn't strain the brain too much. It's a pleasant enough time water for an undemanding audience.

This is actually quite a quirkily constructed little crime noir. It centres around a gang of thieves whom the police seem incapable of catching. Try as they might, they just cannot garner any evidence to arrest and convict these six men. Suddenly, though - their impenetrable armour starts to slip. One by one, they are apprehended for seemingly unassociated crimes until they gradually come to conclude that it is one amongst them who is setting them up. Who might this traitor be? What is most striking about this drama is the setting. A grim and seamy post war London with bombed-out buildings, a thriving black market and some seedy nightclubs where, perhaps, the less said about the quality of the jazz the better? Peter Bull has one of those instantly recognisable, British Bulldog, faces and he steals this ahead of an otherwise unremarkable cast delivering some standard dialogue before a conclusion that does offer us a twist or two (even if we do, kind of, know who is doing the manipulating). At just over an hour, it's decently paced and delivers adequately for an afternoon B-feature. Not great, but good enough.