Hell Is A City

I watched Hell Is A City, a 1960 black and white crime drama starring Stanley Baker and shot in Manchester, on Talking Pictures TV yesterday afternoon (I'd seen clips from it before, but never the whole film).

As part of the British New Wave, the film marks a shift away from the cosiness of Dixon of Dock Green and Gideon of the Yard towards a grittier Northern realism, exemplified by another police procedural, Z Cars, set in a fictional Lancashire new town based on Kirkby, which began in 1962. Stanley Baker does a good job at playing the tough Inspector, although his Mancunian accent veers back once or twice to that of his native South Wales, as does Donald Pleasance as on-course bookmaker Gus (echoes there of the famous Manchester bookie Gus Demmy, whose off-course betting operation would become legal in 1961), who is targetted in a bungled street robbery en route to a race meeting at Doncaster and the body of his clerk dumped on the moors between Manchester and Sheffield, scene of much darker crimes a few years later. Doris Speed makes a cameo appearance as a starchy hospital nurse not unlike her more famous role as Coronation Street landlady Annie Walker.

There are lots of still recognisable locations in and around the city centre to spot, including Piccadilly Gardens, Central Station and Strangeways Prison, but the pub which the police and criminals frequent - with its bottled beer, separate rooms, and waiters in the better ones, superintended by a landlord played by George Cooper (who would go on to appear in Z Cars) - disappeared with the rest of that area when the Arndale Centre was built.