Hell Is a City (1960)

Touches You

Simply A Masterpiece

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

This is a very competent action crime film with an excellent cast and very atmospheric photography - the Northern industrial scenes are almost surreal. Stanley "Could Have Been James Bond" Baker is on great form with a good supporting cast. The script is tight and fast paced with good lighting/cinematography. One of those films to watch late at night and stay up to find out what happens in the end. The treatment of women is typical of 1960's Britain - it's a period piece and the attitude/demeanour of men, given that many went through the Second World War, is a notable contrast with today's society. My only aside is that the opening/closing credits inappropriately reminded me of Police Squad...

This 'Hammer Films' production is still comfortable viewing, even now (2017), largely because of the familiar cast and memorable outdoors scenery. It also helps that the rapid-fire screenplay keeps us moving along with the plot at a brisk and exciting pace. There's also lots going on to pay attention to besides the main cop pursuit.Inspector Martineau (Stanley Baker) marches through the plot leaving his neglected wife, Julia (Maxine Audley) behind. (Despite a rather significant part in the story and being an actress of some renown, she isn't on the list of credits. I have no idea why.)American actor John Crawford plays villain Don Starling and is convincing as the hardened prison escapee trying to round up his swag while avoiding the cops.There are familiar faces aplenty for those 'spotters' among us... and even a turn from an unrecognizable Warren Mitchell (In Sickness and in Health) as a traveling salesman who comes across a dead body. (If you look carefully you can see the victim blink when she's discovered.)A busy Donald Pleasance found time to squeeze in this project with nearly 20 other film and TV commitments in 1960! He plays a bookie with a heart... and a cheating wife (Billie Whitelaw).Sarah Branch (Who?) plays a beautiful deaf and dumb girl innocently caught in the crossfire of crime. And I must say that my only real peeve about this movie is that she never got together with the young detective Devery (Geoffrey Frederick), who comes to interview her. There were obvious sparks going on here yet the viewer is left hanging! Boo!The story is actually a rather complex one, but basically, Starling escapes from jail and teams up with his old partners in crime. Inspector Martineau reckons he knows what the villain is gonna do next so he races off to Manchester to see if his hunch pays off. It does of course as Starling beats it back to the scene of the crime to pick up some stashed jewelry. He and his gang also pull off a robbery which nets them a lot of cash but results in a murder. The body is dumped on the Manchester moors but even that doesn't go according to plan...I suspect that director (and writer) Val Guest was paying his respects to the American 'noir' films of the 1940s here. Hard boiled cops and robbers, fancy dames and dark sleazy surroundings... and it's filmed in black and white!Get yourself over to YouTube and find out for yourself. There's a great copy there in full wide-screen.

image1.jpegHELL IS A CITY, 1959, Director Val GuestVIEWED in London at a special Hammer classics reissue press screening, c. 1996. Inspector Harry Martineau (Stanley Baker), a hard-boiled detective stationed in Manchester England, suspects that a ruthless escaped criminal Don Starling (John Crawford) will come back to town to retrieve a cache of stolen jewels he hid there before his conviction. Martineau has problems at home where he and his wife Julia (Maxine Audley) constantly bicker about his role as a cop which monopolizes his time, and their childless marriage. Starling arrives in town as expected and immediately forms a gang to rob a bookmaker Gus Hawkins (Donald Pleasance), to raise enough cash for a clean getaway but what they grab turns out to be a large amount of money in bank marked bills to prevent their theft. Starling kills a young girl during the robbery and dumps the body by the side of the road out in the country but is spotted by Martineau who is hot on his trail following down one hot lead after another. On the run with Martineau in hot pursuit, now wanted for murder, Starling takes refuge at one point hiding in the attic of the bookmaker he robbed (Pleasance) and threatening his philandering wife Chloe (Billie Whitelaw) he once had an affair with. When discovered by Pleasance Starling manages to knock him out with injuries that put him in the hospital. Martineau, following up another hunch, squeezes more information from Hawkins wife Chloe. At a large outdoor gambling game, where some of the tainted money changes hands, Martineau catches up with the accomplices in the robbery and is now just one step behind his quarry. Starling recovers the cache of stolen jewels from a crooked fence (Furnisher Steele) but has to hide in the storeroom upstairs when the police, tipped off, arrive on the scene. Here, in an extremely harrowing sequence which becomes the unforgettable centerpiece of the film, he holds the beautiful blonde daughter of the fence, Silver Steele, (Sarah Branch) hostage, but she is unable to scream for help because she is deaf and dumb. a( What a twist!) ~ As he stalks her around the attic room piled high with furniture, in desperation she manages to knock out a window which draws the attention of the neighborhood. Martineau breaks in and pursues the vicious killer in a final showdown up on the rooftops above Manchester -- the most suspenseful Mother of all rooftop chases ever filmed. At the end Martineau chooses his job over his marriage. In a wistful coda at his favorite saloon he runs into Lucky Lusk (Vanda Godsell) the attractive barmaid he has been flirting with all along, and she offers herself to him full on, but he turns her open ended offer down on the grounds that he is still married. "Well, she says, in wry resignation, "If you ever have a kid name it for me". The Martineau hard boiled cop figure who doesn't mind bending the law to get his man is a predecessor of Dirty Harry by some twenty years and the mean streets of the city of Manchester are portrayed like another main character hovering over the picture. A major city really seen in British films sits for a remarkable portrait. I had seen this movie years ago when it first came out but quickly disappeared. All I remembered was the white knuckle scene in the attic with the vicious killer relentlessly stalking the pathetically defenseless deaf and dumb girl -- every bit as harrowing and suspenseful now as it was back then. BRAVURA filmmaking beginning to end by Val Guest in a classic B/w mold. Unforgettable. The perfect thriller. Stanley Baker, usually seen in meaty supporting roles, never quite became a top star, but was nevertheless one of the best and most businesslike British actors of his time.

"Life on Mars"?This is more like life on Pluto.Mr Stanley Baker plays the type of cop who feels compelled to try it on with any female with a pulse. He can't walk past an open pub door and threatens to rape his wife in order to impregnate her against her will.Just another day at the office for one of Manchester's finest. "Hell is a city" is an over - rated pseudo Don Siegel opus.Possibly seeing itself as a herald of a new hard - hitting school of Britcop movies,it has a sub - sub Elmer Bernstein/Leith Stevens/Shorty Rogers soundtrack of generic Britjazz cobbled together by that clever musical chameleon Mr Stanley Black that places it exactly in its era. It borrows that hoary old Western plot about childhood companions turned deadly adversaries that ends with one of them dangling on the end of a rope.Full of British actors assuming the all - encompassing "Northern" accent that is both inaccurate and insulting to its Manchester setting, it deals the English language a further blow by having an American play a Manc villain,a piece of casting of breathtaking audacity and indifference to the audience's intelligence. Cardboard character follows cardboard character muttering "eee by gum" imprecations,Yorkshire and Lancashire dialects being freely mixed.Stanley Baker's Inspector Martineau is a despicable woman - hating psychopath.Novelist Maurice Procter who wrote the novel on which the movie was based was said to be "delighted" with the result.It all seems a bit rum to me.