A journeyman of British cinema and a B-movie specialist, director Vernon Sewell is perhaps better known to modern audiences for his ventures into horror cinema in the late 60s and early 70s with films such as THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR, THE CRIMSON CULT and the notorious grave robber horror comedy BURKE & HARE. This November, Spectacle highlights two of his earlier crime thrillers. Made as B-pictures, short features lacking the higher budgets and prestige of the A-features they proceeded, they are remarkable for their tight plotting, economical film-making, dark humor, stark visuals, sharp characterization, ratcheting suspense and explosive conclusions.
STRONGROOM
dir. Vernon Sewell, 1962
United Kingdom. 74 min.
In English.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 8 – 10PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17 – 5:00PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23 – 7:3oPM
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28 – 9:00PM
When a trio of small-time crooks knock off a bank after closing time Friday evening, their robbery is interrupted by the cleaning crew and they imprison the bank manager and his assistant in the bank’s airtight vault or “strongroom” before escaping. Realizing later that Monday is an Easter Holiday and their captives will be trapped in the vault longer than they had first imagined and suffocate, and not wanting a murder on their conscience or on their rap sheets, they make a plan to break back into the bank to release them, while the bank manager and his secretary themselves fight for survival and plot their escape.
Though largely forgotten for many years, the film is enjoying a bit of rediscovery with rave reviews from Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright in an interview on the Empire Magazine Podcast. It also played earlier this year at the Noir City Film Festival in Seattle, Washington, where the film’s shocking ending both stunned and delighted the packed house of festival-goers. Sewell himself called it “a terrific movie.”
“…a very tense, humanly absorbing 80 minutes…” “This is Sewell’s most wholly achieved film…” -Brian McFarlane, BFI Screenonline
The Man in the Back Seat
Dir. Vernon Sewell, 1961.
United Kingdom. 55 min.
In English.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – 7:30PM
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 18 – 10:00PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22 – 5:00PM
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28 – 7:30PM
A pair of crooks, played once again by Derren Nesbitt and Keith Faulkner, rob a bookmaker on his way out of a local dog track. Realizing the bag of cash is handcuffed to his wrist, they hastily throw his unconscious body into the back seat of their car, and drive around as they figure out a way to get the cash and rid themselves of the man in the back seat.
THE MAN IN THE BACK SEAT takes place in one night and the action moves like gangbusters from one darkly comic and grim setback to another. Like STRONGROOM, it is a taut and tense, lean and mean crime thriller from Sewell and an anxious and claustrophobic film that builds to a conclusion steeped in horror and sadness.