Okay, it's a rainy Thursday in Scunthorpe; your tele's on the blink, the chipshop's closed and all the badminton courts at the Leisure Centre are booked solid. The local flea-pit is playing this piece of cheese and at least it'll get you out of the rain. That's about the best you can say for it; someone connected with Film Production has seen a real heist movie - Jacques Becker's Touchez-pas au grisbi, perhaps, or Jules Dassin's Riffifi - and thinks they're easy to do. Wrong. It's like the dozens of Am-Dram outfits all over the country who think Hay Fever is a walk in the park. So, this bright spark wrote the word 'gritty' on a blackboard, signed up a team of second-rate talent and waited for the money to roll in. He's probably still waiting.

An exciting, suspenseful, ingenious thriller, this one makes very inventive use of the author's obviously first-hand knowledge of military red tape. The direction has pace and flair and actual locations are very effectively employed. The film has obviously been produced on an an unusually lavish budget, including an enormous cast. All roles from the largest to the smallest are superlatively played in a solidly realistic manner. The movie also excels with a great number of extras, including loads of location filming and even a sequence in which a whole army building is spectacularly burnt to the ground. As usual in this type of film, our sympathies are directed firmly to the robbers and we feel with them as they collectively and individually make one hairsbreadth escape after another, The screenplay is superbly constructed to extract the utmost suspense and tension and while it seems to be light on characterization, the personable playing by Baker, Bell and others makes up for this deficiency. The Greek unities are observed and fortunately there is no romantic interest whatever to dissipate the film's grip and tension. True, the climax is a bit extravagant and clichéd, but this is the one sour note in an otherwise excellent thriller.

The long awaited DVD release cover gives equal billing to Rodney Bewes and Fulton McKay. Why? Bewes only has one line and I cannot recall Fulton McKay at all. Surely Patrick Magee should have taken a billing slot? Apart from that I consider this film to be on a par with the likes of Hell Drivers, Hell is a City, Villain and Robbery - all finely cast gritty crime dramas of that era. The tight direction, army camp locations, vehicles used and military discipline & bull all add to the reality. The film is gripping throughout and keeps you in suspense. Although Stanley Baker and Tom Bell are again typecast as villains, it would be difficult think of other actors who could have carried this off, except say for Michael Craig. Well recommended.

A gritty thriller based on a heist from an army camp that is busy transiting people and equipment for a crisis war overseas. Typical of the period that was about to launch British neo-realism (film version of kitchen sink stage drama and TV), but it still looks and feels like a fifties postwar UK frayed around the edges and in the middle! With such a downbeat feel, with not enough backstory - Stanley Baker is getting back at the Army for dismissing him without honour some sixteen years earlier - what has he been doing in the meantime? - it does not quite work. Yes, the acting is good, the tension well maintained as one or two things start to go wrong, but why these three got together and what their particular current motivations are does not really come through. And how the plan was initially put together also remains elusive. But it is a good film with honest and straightforward intentions - something today's British post-modernist, cynical,deconstructionist, nothing's any good before last year filmmakers could learn a lot from!