DANGER BY MY SIDE is an acceptable British film noir from low budget studios Butcher's Films. It's a film where the paucity of the budget is always apparent, but this doesn't stop the writer from delivering a surprisingly fast-paced little effort that centres around a gang of diamond thieves and their connection to a sleazy Soho nightclub.
The film opens effectively with a well-staged robbery, then plays out a murder scene which is unexpected to say the least; a sort of spin on Janet Leigh's death in PSYCHO. From this point, the surprisingly decent Maureen Connell takes the lead as a woman who makes it her job to go undercover to catch the men responsible. Larger-than-life women pad out the cast here, always proving more memorable than their male counterparts.
Although this is an entirely low rent affair with little action or incident to remember it by, it does have a good atmosphere and the Soho-set scenes are effective to say the least. It also has the old cliché of filming dancing/stripping women as a way to pad out the running time, a device beloved of American producers since the 1970s. Although there are next to no familiar faces in this one, DANGER BY THE SIDE is perfectly acceptable fare for those who like this sort of thing.
The film opens effectively with a well-staged robbery, then plays out a murder scene which is unexpected to say the least; a sort of spin on Janet Leigh's death in PSYCHO. From this point, the surprisingly decent Maureen Connell takes the lead as a woman who makes it her job to go undercover to catch the men responsible. Larger-than-life women pad out the cast here, always proving more memorable than their male counterparts.
Although this is an entirely low rent affair with little action or incident to remember it by, it does have a good atmosphere and the Soho-set scenes are effective to say the least. It also has the old cliché of filming dancing/stripping women as a way to pad out the running time, a device beloved of American producers since the 1970s. Although there are next to no familiar faces in this one, DANGER BY THE SIDE is perfectly acceptable fare for those who like this sort of thing.