Danger by My Side

The tone of this Butchers crime film (made in the days when quota quickie veterans like John Stuart and Wally Patch still adorned the supporting cast) is set by the title sequence featuring the title song delivered by a brassy blonde as we enter a world of criminality and strip clubs infiltrated by an intrepid young female.

The most dramatic moment occurs unintentionally about fifteen minutes in when heroine Maureen Connell gasps and glances to the side in an obviously unscripted moment preserved for posterity since director Charles Saunders evidently didn't feel the need for a retake.

When her brother, an undercover policeman, gets run down by a car, his sister, Maureen Connell, wants justice. Detective Inspector Anthony Oliver says there are no leads, so Miss Connell offers to investigate on her own. Oliver takes her up, with the understanding she'll report any leads to him. She quickly discovers that everything points to a night club run by the usual villains.

It's a cheap second feature that doesn't run a full hour, and director Charles Saunders can't bring much to it. He had had a good career, first as an editor, then as a director since 1943, where he proved himself capable of turning out good programmers, but this was his last credit; retired from the movies and television at age 58, although he lived to be 92.

This being the 1960s, the lingering remnants of the censor and film noir appear with a couple of strippers at the club who never show anything strategic.

DANGER BY MY SIDE is an acceptable British film noir from low budget studios Butcher's Films. It's a film where the paucity of the budget is always apparent, but this doesn't stop the writer from delivering a surprisingly fast-paced little effort that centres around a gang of diamond thieves and their connection to a sleazy Soho nightclub.

The film opens effectively with a well-staged robbery, then plays out a murder scene which is unexpected to say the least; a sort of spin on Janet Leigh's death in PSYCHO. From this point, the surprisingly decent Maureen Connell takes the lead as a woman who makes it her job to go undercover to catch the men responsible. Larger-than-life women pad out the cast here, always proving more memorable than their male counterparts.

Although this is an entirely low rent affair with little action or incident to remember it by, it does have a good atmosphere and the Soho-set scenes are effective to say the least. It also has the old cliché of filming dancing/stripping women as a way to pad out the running time, a device beloved of American producers since the 1970s. Although there are next to no familiar faces in this one, DANGER BY THE SIDE is perfectly acceptable fare for those who like this sort of thing.

When her undercover police officer brother is killed in an hit-and-run, "Lynne" (a competent Maureen Connell) is convinced that the job he was on is the cause and so sets about an investigation, in cahoots with "Insp. Willoughby" (Anthony Oliver) of her own. Quickly, she is embroiled with nightclub owner "Venning" (Alan Tilvern) discovering that he presides over a gang of petty thieves - but nothing to connect him with her brother. Until, that is - well it all centres around trips to Europe and diamonds. There's nothing particularly original here, but the absence of a star leaves for a consistency of rep-style performances that keeps the story fairly taut and watchable. I didn't love the conclusion - all a bit rushed, but as these hour long afternoon filler-features go, this is quickly paced and competently presented. Nope, you'll never remember it, but it's worth watch.

I usually love the black-and-white crime drama programmers from England in the late 50's and early 60's, but this one is thinner than most. At times it seems like the plot is merely the excuse to have half-naked girls dancing about on a tiny stage for inordinately long periods of time. Maureen Connell is actually pretty good in the lead as the sister of a murdered undercover cop. She goes undercover herself to work in the bad guy's club to try and find out about the usual 'big job'. (The club has all the half-naked girls dancing around singing songs like "DANGER BY MY SIDE".) She just about stumbles on all the clues and the bad guys stumble on the fact that she's a stoolie for the cops and the cops stumble on the bad guys at the end. The End. Passes the time, but directors like Montgomery Tully did a much better job of this kind of thing.