Rent Nightbeat (1947)

Nylons with Violence - Nightbeat review by CH

“I've brought an embrocation. This will take the sting out of it.” Embrocation is a word to locate Nightbeat in a time -1947 - and place: a would-be smart night-club off Piccadilly. Its owner, who has done time, is Maxwell Reed, and his offer of a bottle of soothing champagne on a sofa in his flat is designed to ease one of many complications in the amatory involvements which propel this film through an engrossing crew of spivs, wide-boys - and a fair spectrum of the police force.

Developed from a story by Guy Morgan, and directed by the versatile journeyman Harold Huth, it has much more going for it than was perhaps apparent at the time. A lorryload of soldiers are dropped off near Parliament Square on their return from the Far East - and before long a brawl breaks out in a pub after one of them (Ronald Howard, whose face later brought him a television role as Sherlock Holmes) has palmed off somebody with shoddy black-market clothes. He is saved from greater damage by fellow wartime soldier Hector Ross, who is in love with Howard's sister, the ever-prim Anne Crawford (who was to die a few years later from cancer). Trouble is that, during the war, Anne Crawford was lent a flat for little by Reed; Ross's hackles rise as much as his suspicions.

For lack of any other work, both men join the police force and there are interesting scenes of their training. Some of this is directed and edited at too slow a pace, but one's interest is quickly re-engaged, not least because this includes the most unlikely Sid James pairing before his appearance in the terrific Hell Drivers with Sean Connery a decade later. Here, he plays a pianist in the club's band - and accompanies Christine Norden during some sultry singing which makes demands not only upon her tonsils but the rest of her anatomy as she swivels in the spotlight.

Who was she? Here she plays a good-time gal, and her own life appears to have been wild (she left some memoirs still too torrid to publish). In the film she recalls wartime experience with a GI (“nylons dripped off him like sweat”) and, on a sofa, when told, “no! don't you know the meaning of no?”, she replies, “it wasn't in any book I read at school.”

The plot has many turns, it is good value, with quayside glimpses after dark. If neither Hector Ross nor Ronald Howard shine in their leading roles, there is so much else here. Maxwell Reed is just right for the club owner with hopes of a better life thwarted by old associates and the temptations of Christine Norden's flesh. He offers her a key to a flat, and she asks, “where's the catch?” “On the front door.”

For all that, it is a shame that, in general, Reed did not take the advice of Joan Collins (he was her first husband) and loosen up in his acting style. He could have become better known.

Meanwhile, one is left to wonder whether Sid James could play the piano - and to recall Samuel Johnson's definition of “embrocation”: “the act of rubbing any part diseased with medicinal liquors or spirits.” Such a waste of champagne, even while Reed subjects Christine Norden's calf to close attention.