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 searching for evidence.
Some aspects of the film must have seemed quite normal at the time but seem odd today, most obviously the fact that veteran officer P C Dixon and his wife live in a cramped terraced house which they used to share with their son, and eventually let their sons` old bedroom to a new recruit who is struggling to find decent accommodation.
Dysfunctional families and individuals abound. If any character is romanticised it may be old-time gangster Mike (Michael Golden) who conducts his dealings with the Police with an air of studied insolence but seemingly harbours no ill-will to individual officers and ultimately helps brings about the downfall of one of the film`s principal villains, apparently out of a belated burst of public-spiritedness.
Some may choose to view this film a a hymn to a so-called golden age, but I suspect the filmgoers of 1950 saw it very differently.
