Rent Cosh Boy (1953)

An Unsweet Thames - Cosh Boy review by CH

“It was a shop girl's melodrama and the public loved it.” So recalls Joan Collins of Cosh Boy (1952), directed by Lewis Gilbert (“adorable to me, and good to work with”). He was also to work with her on The Good Die Young, and from these English variants on noir he would take in such diverse items as Reach for the Sky, Alfie, several Bonds and Educating Rita.

As Joan Collins puts it in her 1978 memoir Past Imperfect, “the film was the story of a group of youths who spent their time getting their kicks by robbing and beating up people – rather like today's muggers. I played Rene, the innocent young girlfriend of James Kenney. We had an explicit love scene in the garden of a deserted house, which by today's standards was tame enough to be in a Disney film.”

Kenney played the leader of a gang whose ad hoc headquarters was one of the era's numerous inner-city bomb sites with cover provided by a youth club to which he and an accomplice (Ian Whittaker) had been assigned as a condition of probation after an earlier assault. Kenney's performance is remarkable. It can be rightly compared to that by Richard Attenborough as Pinkie. Both are troubled, insecure. In the case of Kenney, he is one of many whose father did not return from the war and is in well-nigh Oedipal thrall to a mother (Betty Anne Davies) who hankers for another man, one who might be able to control this wayward juvenile delinquent (when did this Fifties term fall from use?).

As with Pinkie, there is a hysterical pitch to Kenney's commands; it gets higher with his every refusal to believe that he himself is responsible for anything going wrong. As Joan Collins recalls, Lewis Gilbert brought out the very best in a young cast. He also had a veritable troupe of experienced actors. Almost inevitably there is a moment with a seen-it-all desk-sergeant Sid James, who is taking down evidence from Hermione Gingold, one of those whose illicit takings have made her a victim of the gang's cosh. Meanwhile, Joan Collins's mother is played by a Hermione Baddeley hopelessly adamant that her daughter should have no truck with this hoodlum.

So much for the scenario. What brings all this to another level is the cinematography. Much of it takes place after hours, filmed in some Hammersmith streets; this does not preclude a robbery which finds them on Chelsea Bridge and narrowly escaping the fangs of an outraged occupant of Battersea Dogs' Home after ducking over a wall.

There is more to all this than was perhaps evident to all those involved at the time of its filming. To them, it was welcome work; to us, it is a well-realized, enduring record of the fact that for no country does war end with the signing of a peace treaty: there are repercussions in which psychology plays as much a part as ration books..

This remarkable film is here available as dvd issued by the British Film Institute. Its “extras” include numerous other early works by Lewis Gilbert. Believe it or not, among these is one in which Charles Hawtrey explores the steel-based nature of post-war pre-fabricated buildings. And, geekishly fascinating at that is, a more exciting item, made for the Children's Film Foundation, is Johnny on the Run (matter for another day).

And after all that, there is a recollection by one of the Cosh Boy gang. Ian Whittaker was with Kenney in the original play, Master Crook, by Bruce Walker which toured the country before it reached the West End. They were the only two of that cast to appear in the film. Curiously, such is memory, he recalls – contrary to Joan Collins – that the some public shunned the film as it coincided with the enduring controversy of the Craig-Bentley “let him have it!”

All of which shows that this terrific film is the very stuff of life and sudden death.