Scotland Yard's Inspector Lane (Jack Warner) fights against the clock to find three potential donors for a dying child who urgently requires three pints of an extremely rare blood group. The donors include a boxing champion (Freddie Mills), a black sailor (Earl Cameron) who is reluctant to donate because during the Second World War a Nazi soldier refused his blood and he attributed the incident to racism and, the third, is a murderer on the run whom the police track down in Brighton. But, the man is shot and he is faced with the choice of donating and dying at the scene or, if he refuses, will surely die anyway as he will be tried and hanged for a murder he committed several years before.An above average offering from poverty row studio Butcher's Films who churned out a countless number of British b-pics throughout the 1950's and early 1960's. Some of which were so awful they showed Britain's film industry at a very low ebb. But, there were one or two exceptions and this stands as one of them. It got elevated to 'A' feature status at the time. Directed by Lewis Gilbert who would go on to become a top director of such films as Reach For The Sky; he succeeds in wringing considerable suspense out of some of the situations - especially the hunt for the murderer on the run - and the stellar cast includes Jack Warner (Dixon Of Dock Green) who is perfectly comfortable in the role of the Scotland Yard inspector and Sid James is in there too perfectly cast as a dodgy boxing promoter and Eric Pholmann as a rival promoter would go on to voice the faceless Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the early Bond films. As was usually the case for these type of films, however, the plot turns are pretty predictable. Nonetheless, it is a top class picture for a Butcher's production and the studio remade the film in 1962 as Emergency with b-movie veteran Francis Searle directing.

EMERGENCY CALL is a film that takes an old premise, involving a sick and ailing child who desperately needs to be saved by a transfusion of rare blood, and uses it as a basis for a film which explores working class life in London in the early 1950s. It's an intriguing little portrait of its time, depicting a bygone era populated by racial tension, corrupt boxing promoters, and criminals desperately trying to cover up their past crimes. The film is episodic in nature and hampered by the constraints of a low budget, but not without interest for fans of the genre.The cast includes Jack Warner (TV's DIXON OF DOCK GREEN) playing, you guessed, a policeman, and real-life boxing champ Freddie Mills playing, well, a boxer. There are also roles for those who would achieve later fame, including Thora Hird and Sid James. The film shrugs off the social commentary about two thirds of the way in, ending up as a police procedural thriller with an effective climax. Not great, but there's still plenty of interest here.

Archetypal film that shows post war Britain as it is understood by those of us who grew up with Dixon of Dock Green, Freddie Mills, Sydney Tafler and Sid James writing our scripts. Wonderful stuff with a conclusion we know will be solved just before the film ends, so we can all go to bed knowing that all is right with the world and we are being protected by our new NHS and police force who do no wrong.Such a shame we learnt the truth by the eighties by which time we had grown up and discovered how complex the world really is, but oh how we can recall the kindly usherette showing us to our seats in a darkened cinema as we all felt part of the same Britain for just an hour and a half before the new Queen was crowned. Wonderful evocative stuff or a load of old clap trap depending on your take on the world?

Competent if slightly stodgy (and now rather dated) British B-movie. The plot centres around a child critically ill in hospital who needs a blood transfusion to save her life. Unfortunately she has a rare blood group, so Scotland yard are called in to track down possible donors. This is used as a framework for a collection of little stories about life in London ca 1950 rather in the style of "The Blue Lamp". Jack Warner and Sid James as a boxing manager (who could be a decent character actor when he tried) do a reasonable job at keeping the plot afloat. Now mainly of interest as a social document.