The Blue Lamp – 1950 | 82 mins | Drama | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Basil Dearden‘s The Blue Lamp was an extended tribute to the Metropolitan Police, stretched in their fight against the post-war crime wave, the film is notable for its introduction of the character Police Constable Dixon (Jack Warner, with Gladys Henson as his long-serving wife). Eliminated halfway through by a gunman’s bullet, he was reincarnated and paraded in the BBC television series Dixon of Dock Green which ran on and on into the mid Seventies, and presumably would have gone on running had not Dixon, latterly a station sergeant, become anachronistically aged, since Jack Warner at the close was eighty-two.

The screenplay, based on a story by Ted Willis, was by Tibby Clarke who had himself served in the Metropolitan Police as a War Reserve Constable, and thus had some inkling of police routine and jargon. Unfortunately, the police force he presents seems to be a highly idealised one, put across in the best public relations terms, with avuncular, protective, friendly coppers on the beat, helping old ladies, giving directions, holding children’s hands and occasionally, cheerfully moving on an obstructive barrow boy. Against images of police duty on this banal level a voice-over narration spells out the facts of the crime wave, blaming it squarely on the new breed of post-war criminals who ‘lack the code, experience and self-discipline of the professional thief… a class apart, all the more dangerous because of their immaturity’. This thought perhaps typifies the Ealing view of the world, where even the criminals have their decencies and acceptable standards of conduct. The new outlaws are giving crime a bad name.

On the one hand the story follows the first days of a rookie policeman settling in at his new post. Andy (Jimmy Hanley) is fresh-faced, keen, anxious to shine. Pc Dixon shows him the ropes and offers him lodgings under his roof, a tiny terraced house with pigeons in the backyard and socks drying on the line under the mantelpiece. In contrast to this cosy domestic life, which continues in the police station with shots of choir practice and friendly jossing over egg-and-chips in the canteen, is set the story of two young hoodlums, played by Dirk Bogarde and Patric Doonan, and a raid on a dowdy suburban cinema in which Dixon is shot down in cold blood. It seems that shooting a policeman, let alone one as popular with the community as this one, is simply not a right and proper way to further a life of crime, and there is a tacit understanding between the police and the underworld to help catch the guilty. Bogarde is eventually tracked to the White City Stadium during a greyhound meeting, where the tic-tac signals of the bookies are used to trap him. The film concludes with young Andy, now an established constable on Dixon’s old beat, the embodiment of all the virtues of the old policeman.

Dearden used real London locations in a way that was relatively novel in British films of the period, with exciting visual results. Dearden made the pavements of Paddington Green and Ladbroke Grove, Edgware Road and Leicester Square look refreshing and the police car chase through the grey streets of inner West London is dramatic and convincing. It is the flat and stereotyped characterisation which disappoints, with Hanley and Warner performing their familiar affectionate notion of working class behaviour, and Robert Flemyng representing CID and Scotland Yard with a tight-lipped school accent redolent of the First XI and officers mess, while Peggy Evans, a sort of Rank charm school starlet, plays Bogarde’s moll like a girl from Esher pretending to be a cockney. Bogarde’s is the only interesting performance – even this early in his career it is clear he is a gifted actor.

Extract© George Perry: Forever Ealing.