The Informers (1965)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

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!

THE INFORMERS is a top-tier British crime drama that takes a straightforward plot about a group of bank robbers and invests it with depth, deep characterisation, and at times an epic kind of feel. These heist stories were ten-a-penny during the era, but this film's tapestry is vast and a whole slew of British character actors, old and young, make up the tableau. Nigel Patrick is excellent as the dogged detective on the case while Harry Andrews plays his exasperated superior. The bad guys are helmed by a stand-out Frank Finley, making an impression at a young age, and an incredibly slimy Derren Nesbitt at his most weaselly. This is undoubtedly an actor's film, with small but important parts for the likes of George Sewell, Roy Kinnear, Colin Blakely, Allan Cuthbertson, Michael Coles, and many more besides. Margaret Whiting is a particular stand-out as the sympathetic femme fatale but nobody puts a foot wrong here and the experience is thrilling, dramatic, and thoroughly suspenseful.

Since "The informers"(based on a fine novel "Death of a snout")was made the whole issue of the police/informant relationship has been debated,set in Case Law,been the subject of numerous reviews,questions in The House etc with the result that officers are now obliged to register snouts at a central base and inform senior detectives of their existence and of every instance when they are used.Failure to do so renders them liable to the severest penalties under the Discipline Code including dismissal. Where there is a computer of course,there is a consequent security issue,so it is hardly surprising that many of the best snouts,"good 'uns",as they used to be called,were unregistered and therefore "illegal".My personal solution to this problem was to register two totally fictitious snouts and run my "good 'un" illegally and out of my own pocket."Socksie",as he was called for his aversion to washing feet that left them so ingrained with filth that he espoused the wearing of socks,was pure gold,was never sussed out and passed on peacefully at Leigh - on - Sea in 1998.Ironically his funeral was attended by several "faces" he had helped put away. Not so Inspector Johnnoe's "good 'un" who meets an untimely end causing the D.I. to do the honourable if not most sensible thing. Back in the 1950s the British public assumed that their police force caught lawbreakers using methods totally within the law.By the time "The informers" came out,cynicism had started creeping in and soon full - blooded distrust was common fired by the Hal Woolf affair,D.S. "Tanky" Challenor's antics at West End Central and the burgeoning awareness of major corruption in many big city forces. Coppers of Inspector Johnnoe's ilk were becoming an endangered species. There really were men like him,fearless and dead straight,dedicated to sorting out the villains on the ground.They had no targets to meet,no community awareness to be sensitive to,they just nicked toerags. Nobody likes snouts - "Socksie" was not a nice man - but no policeman can succeed without them.Johnnoe treads a fine and difficult line with his informant,as does every copper.Worse for him,his guv'nor does not believe in the use of snouts,making him either a puritan or corrupt himself - hard to know which is worse. Johnnoe is framed by the arch - villain after doing a little "off the books" spin of his drum and gets suspended for his trouble.Joining up with his snout's surviving brother and assorted hardmen,he gets things sorted,as they used to say. Britcop movies in general vary between the cheery cockneyness of "The Blue Lamp" and the ludicrously biased and semi - fictional "In the name of the father",via the sadistic "watch me I'm having a photogenic breakdown" nonsense of "The Offence". "The Informers",together with the criminally (ha,ha)underrated "The Strange affair" stands right at the top of the tree.It really is what it used to be like. Had somebody have done "Socksie" in back in the late 70s would I have risked life,limb and pension to revenge him?.I don't think so. Inspector Johnnoe was a better man than I.