THE BLUE LAMP
UK, 1950, 84 minutes, Black and white.
Jack Warner, Jimmy Hanley, Dirk Bogarde, Robert Flemyng, Bernard Lee, Peggy Evans, Meredith Edwards, Dora Bryan, Gladys Henson.
Directed by Basil Dearden.
The Blue Lamp is one of the earliest of the British police films, a glimpse of two policemen on the beat and their ordinary lives. It also shows the emerging youth gangs in London after World War Two. The film was shot around the Paddington area.
Jack Warner was a veteran of many British films and made his character, George Dixon, who is killed in the film, the subject of a television series, Dixon of Dock Green. Jimmy Hanley was a young star in Britain at the time and Dirk Bogarde was emerging. He made his mark as a young thug.
The screenplay was written by T.E.B. Clarke, a veteran writer of many of the films made at Ealing Studios in the 1940s and 1950s including Hue and Cry, Passport to Pimlico, The Magnet, The Titfield Thunderbolt and The Lavender Hill Mob. Basil Dearden had started directing in the 1940s and was making a number of small-budget films at the time. He made a number of action adventures during the 1950s including The Sea Shall Not Have Them. He moved into much more serious social themes in the late 1950s and early 1960s with Victim as well as Sapphire. He made a contemporary version of Othello in 1962, All Night Long. His big-budget film Khartoum, with Laurence Olivier and Charlton Heston, came out in 1966. He made The Assassination Bureau with Diana Rigg and unfortunately died in a car accident in 1971.
1. The film was considered important in its time in Britain. Why? Its portrait of the police and their police work, the documentary style, the human feeling? Its impact now?
2. British film-making in the forties, black and white photography, studio work, the seeking out of authentic locations? How does this film compare with the many American models of police and gangster films at the same time?
3. The film as a tribute to the police, the tone of the title, the study of police, work and routines?
4. The human touches of the film? How well done were they, how important for public response and sympathy for the police? How convincing in the forties, now?
5. The characterizations of Dixon and Mitchell and the film's focus on them? The older and the younger policeman? Their good nature, good fellowship, relationship with their fellow police? The seeing of them in their ordinary routines on the beat? How well could the average audience identify with them? The presentation of their domestic life in humorous detail and with sentiment? The worries of the wives, the dangers that the police ran, their not carrying arms? The dedication of this ordinary policeman? How convincing was this?
6. The presentation of Scotland Yard with its work, accurate precision, efficiency, relationship with the police on the beat?
7. The contrast with the world of the criminals - how ugly? The world that the police had to confront and control? For protecting ordinary citizens? The small-time gangsters and their lodgings, girl-friends? The cheap atmosphere of the small-time crooks? The portrait of their girl-friends? The contrast with the people that the police met on the beat - the prostitutes, the down-trodden wives?
8. The film's focus on crime, the presentation of the robbery, To, Riley killing? Audience response to this? Imagination? The importance of Dixon's unnecessary death?
9. The sequence where Dixon's wife compared sorrow with the murdered girl’s mother? How moving were these scenes - how contrived for sympathy for the police?
10. How much insight into the world of the police did the film give, how much compassion for this necessary work?
