Nowhere To Go Review

• 3rd Jan 2013

Ealing films are best known for their comedies, but even the comedies had dark elements – think of the black comedies Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955). Alternately people think of such dark dramas as It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) or one of the only British horror films made after the war until Hammer came along, Dead of Night (1945), all of which belonged to pre-comedy and post war Ealing. But throughout, even during the height of the golden Ealing comedy era Ealing Studios were making dark films. Nowhere to Go, however, comes right at the end of Ealing Studios life as a brand which is demonstrated from the very opening shot telling us the film is an MGM presentation of an Ealing Studios film and belongs in the canon of Ealing’s darker films.

The film opens with a long sequence of a prison break as a charming Canadian conman, Paul Gregory (George Nader) who is broken out of prison by his former associate and partner in crime, Victor Sloane (Bernard Lee). The film then flashes back to the reasons for his jailing after he stole and sold some valuable coins from a wealthy old lady (played by veteran silent actress Bessie Love). He accepts that he may get 5 years for the crime but is instead given the harsh sentence of 10 years. After his escape he goes into hiding having never divulged the whereabouts of the £55,000 he received as payment for the coins. His former partner gets greedy and tries to rob the money from Gregory leading to the Canadian attempting to get his own back. Paul Gregory soon finds himself backed into a corner with the police now hot on his heels and finding that he has fewer places to hide out let alone getting out of Britain.

On the surface this crime movie might not be indistinguishable from the myriad of other British crime films made in the 1950s especially after the success of The Blue Lamp (1949) (another Ealing classic). But in reality this is a much underrated Ealing film that deserves a re-evaluation and is in fact a fairly complex thriller with a sharp script by director Seth Holt and Kenneth Tynan. One of the reasons for it becoming such a little known film are possibly aplenty from the fact that this is one of the last films to be made by Ealing Studios, that MGM interference hindered much of the filmmaker’s autonomy, Nader was a little known actor both in Hollywood and the UK and was as a result poorly received by the critics as well as including a very uneasy jazz soundtrack provided by Dizzy Reece. But on viewing this film for the first time it stands out from other thrillers of the period in the sharpness of the script. It was directed and co-written by Seth Holt, a first time director who would go onto make three of Hammer’s more interesting films but made few films. He co-wrote the film with famed film critic Kenneth Tynan (in one of only two cinematic writing attempts) and, as one would expect has a sterling support cast from the ever-reliable Bernard Lee and Geoffrey Keen (who had both played M in the James Bond franchise, who were always in films of this type), both of whom one would expect to see in a film like this and there is also an uncredited cameo from Lionel Jeffries as the owner of a pet shop. The biggest surprise of all though is the debut performance of a very young Maggie Smith as the smart suspicious love interest.

The only extra of note on the disc is a smartish 12 minute documentary entitled ‘Revisiting Nowhere to Go’ which is a concise and contextual doc about the making of the film which includes interviews with Ealing and British cinema historian and writer Charles Barr as well as interviews with crew on the film. The transfer is pretty reasonable but this was a virtually forgotten film until it was recently shown as a part of the BFI retrospective of Ealing films shown at the BFI and is certainly a surprising film from the studio and one for the collection and is here appearing for the first time on DVD.

Chris Hick