Basil Dearden (Dir) - The Blue Lamp - Ealing - 1950
Basil Dearden (Director) - The Blue Lamp - Ealing - 1950 Recently had a welcome opportunity to watch The Blue Lamp, a film I`ve seen many times before. Many regard the film as a bit one-dimensional, a story of salt-of-the-earth coppers pursuing reckless young villains. They can`t have been paying attention (or possibly they are confusing the film with the spin-off TV series Dixon of Dock Green). In fact, the film is a remarkably gritty depiction of a post-war Britain in which kids play on bomb sites and one officer has a spare room to let because his son is dead. As the introductory voice-over makes clear, the young would-be hoodlums come from families damaged by war and are avoided by established organised crime as being undependable ("stick to gas meters" sneers one gangster when Dirk Bogarde`s psycho misfit Tom asks him to handle the proceeds of a proposed robbery). The signs of a war-ravaged city are all around, particularly in the scenes where the Police are out ...