Nowhere to Go is a British crime film first released in 1958, directed by Seth Holt and Basil Dearden. The film is based on a novel by Donald MacKenzie and stars George Nader, Maggie Smith and Bernard Lee. Our overall rating for this film is: good.
Plucked from obscurity and restored to its original running time for this Studiocanal DVD, Seth Holt's 1958 NOWHERE TO GO is an atypical Ealing film, but a terrific British noir thriller.
IT's always get a thrill when a film has an opening one's not seen before, particularly when that film is over fifty years old and British. We have, after all, seen our share of crime thrillers that kick off with a bank job or some other nefarious deed. But how many can you recall where the pre-title sequence consists someone breaking into a prison? It's a hell of a hook, all the more so for being staged wordlessly at night, in and out of the shadows thrown by security lighting.
An atypical last flourish from Ealing Studios, Nowhere to Go (1958) was hacked by Metro Goldwyn Mayer and lost 15 minutes of its running time to accommodate it within a double bill on original release. Studio Canal offer the unmolested version of the film on DVD this month and serve up a welcome opportunity to witness the dying days of Michael Balcon's studio in Seth Holt's visually assured, downbeat film noir crime thriller.
Playing it cool throughout as Gregory is George Nader, who for a good part of the running time has to carry the film without the crutch of dialogue, his good looks, easy smile and pragmatic approach to sometimes self-generated misfortune makes him an intriguing and oddly likeable anti-hero. He's backed up by a solid supporting cast that's peppered with familiar faces, including Geoffrey Keen as the quietly dogged Inspector Scott, Lionel Jeffries as a pet-shop owner, an almost unrecognisable Harry H. Corbett as underworld kingpin Sullivan, and a young Maggie Smith making her film acting debut as Bridget Howard, the woman who comes looking for the previous occupant of Gregory's flat and who you just know is going to somehow figure later in his adventures. And Bond fans should get a small thrill when Bernard Lee, the man who played M for so many years, reveals the ruthless side of Gregory's long-term accomplice Sloane.
It all began with his plan to pull a con on fellow Canadian Harriet P. Jefferson, freshly arrived in London to sell a valuable coin collection bequeathed by her late husband, the details of which are smartly devised and best left for the film itself to reveal. The real surprise is that Gregory anticipated his arrest and conviction for the crime and fashioned it into his meticulous plan, reasoning that the five years he will spend in jail is a small price to pay for the £50,000 haul, which works out at the princely sum of £14,000 a year with time off for good behaviour. Who would begrudge a little jail time for that? The problem is that he gets ten years instead of five, hence his decision to engineer the opening escape. All he has to do now his collect the cash from the safe deposit box in which it was secured (under a false name, of course), then have Sloane procure a fake passport and hop off to Canada. Simple enough, right? Oh, if
