Sorry, this movie sucks

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

RIVER PATROL is a cheap, short thriller from the team at Hammer Films. It's a far cry from their later horror fare or even their thrillers of the 1950s. John Blythe, who usually plays an unpleasant character in the likes of HOLIDAY CAMP, plays a river detective on the hunt for a gang of tights smugglers (yes, you heard that right). This is as cheap as they come and the only good thing about it is that the running time, under 50 minutes, is so brief as to mean that the pace is very fast so that this doesn't have much chance to get boring. It plays out as a police procedural for the most part, with a few perilous moments and a turn from the reliable Wally Patch playing a bad guy for a change. It only really picks up in the last ten minutes or so.

This film was made by Hammer at Marylebone Studios.Clearly these studios were about the size of a broom cupboard.In one scene set in a detectives room one of the actors actually has to come in sideways in order to sit at a desk.The leading man is John Blithe,here cast as a river policeman,normally playing spivs.He is on the case of a nylon smuggling gang led by the redoubtable Wally Patch.In one scene Patch stabs someone with his swordstick.Only we don't see the victim as the studio is to small to get everyone in view.The climactic fight between Blithe and Patch at the end is too funny to be true.I wonder if they had a fight co ordinator in those days.As entertaining as a low budget film like this could expect to be.

A rare gem this crime film from the other side of the channel. Never heard of the director, the actors and the movie itself. The classic, foreseeable, forgettable story of a Young cop fighting against gangsters in the docks of London, smugglers, racketers. Nothing really impressive here, but some characters are quite interesting. For instance the evil bad guy, the gangsters' lead. The climax sounds cheap but is still good, for such a tiny production. In resume, not bad, for this rare gem from the years just after the war. The Blitz; but we don't see many London settings here, the post war London famous settings; see what I mean. The London after the Blitz...As we see in so many movies.