Hell is a City

1960, UK, directed by Val Guest

An excellent, unusual British crime film set in Manchester and centered on a manhunt/man-to-man battle of wits between a criminal back on his home turf and an experienced, hard-bitten detective (Stanley Baker), marred only by a score that is rather intrusive at times. There’s nothing romantic about the criminals here, and indeed there’s a brutality in the depiction of the central crime and its aftermath that I don’t usually associate with the time period. In addition to a wonderful gallery of mostly northern character actors, there are some very fine bits of location business: pubs, backstreets, and moors and, in one extended sequence, wasteland used for a game of coin-tossing of the kind we see some years later in Wake in Fright – oddly enough another film featuring Donald Pleasance. The picture was made with the cooperation of the Manchester police, notable mainly because Baker’s character is less than entirely positive, particularly with respect to his home life.