Violent Playground (1958)

The Basil Dearden season continues, presenting many noir-adjacent films that are more the by product of the medium than its core element, dealing with teenage, social and criminal problems and the police effort to present social reason for the increasing use of machine guns by school students.

Violent Playground (1958) is a Basil Dearden teenage tearaway race relations British battle of wills between a Liverpool Juvenile Liaison officer and a young and dangerous pyromaniac rock n roll social problem picture movie response to the alarmist, hugely successful teen melodrama The Blackboard Jungle (US, 1955) James Kennaway scripted inspired by an actual experiment that was carried out in Liverpool in 1949 late period Limey noir crime and civic anxiety fusion and social confusion picture starring Stanley Baker, Anne Heywood, David McCallum, Peter Cushing, John Slater and Clifford Evans.

Blind Date (1959)

Blind Date (1959) is a Losey Limey London-based violence-against-women flashback and sophisticated murder mystery puzzle artist anti-hero police procedural erotic class and privilege social corruption film noir, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Hardy Krüger, Stanley Baker and Michelene Presle, with extra Gordon Jackson for the hardy Brit fan that likes a bit of the Scotch roughage in uniform.

In 1959, amid the twilight of post-war certainties and the emergent undercurrents of cultural upheaval in Britain, Joseph Losey released Blind Date (retitled Chance Meeting for its American audience). 

Hell Drivers (1957)

Hell Drivers (1957) is a blue-collar ex-con high energy British exploitation truck noir tale of violence, corruption and the unscrupulous carriage of aggregates across small distances within the British countryside.

Stanley Baker as per the script of this still popular tale of truckery does the ex-con going straight routine with heavy nods and grave expressions from start to finish, indicating that he has been 'away' and that he has been living 'here and there' and doing 'this and that' while being from 'around' and having lived at 'around' for several years.

It isn't really full explained what this ex-con with an upright galvanised steel morality did to wind up in prison, but we know that because of his escapade he did one year of time, although more meaningfully, it seems that his younger — brother played by the mysterious Klae Corporation's very own invisible man David McCallum — seems to have been permanently injured during the crime, and reduced to working in his mother's Welsh corner shop for life.