A good early David McCallum performance, a properly rockin title song that's almost as good as Bill Haley, and great location shooting in beautiful, grimy, downtown Liverpool (thankfully, for us Yanks, minus the local dialect), is countered if not completely nullified by the almost always fatal decision of writer James Kennaway and director Basil Dearden to put The Problem, in this case juvenile delinquency, before the story and the characters. This results, of course, in the action and pace of the film coming to periodic dull halts while we listen to cops, priests and school principals opine on the scourge of youth crime and alienation so that the film feels much longer than its hour and forty five minutes and by the time the climactic hostage taking occurs we're so worn out with this Stanley Krameresque stuff that we're ready to yell "lock 'em up!" Throw in a dull love interest between Stanley Baker and Anne Heywood plus the fact that at no time are the jd's other than McCallum in any way menacing, let alone interestingly screwed up, and you can see why this film failed to catch on. Give it a C plus.
PS...I'm happy to report that even playing a socially conscious padre Peter Cushing manages to be somewhat creepy.
PS...I'm happy to report that even playing a socially conscious padre Peter Cushing manages to be somewhat creepy.