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!
Review of A Prize of Arms
