Powerful

good back-story, and good acting

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.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Sorry nearly everything is just so bad in this film. The only highlights for me are seeing 'old' London of the early fifties but even this is cheap, tiresome etc etc - (did I expect though for them to empty London for lengthy stock shots - no but they were just disjointed nothings in the end). The slang cockney voices of posh actresses just grates, and the calmness and wherewithal of the all knowing police authorities defies description. God help us if they had really gone about the task of locating the scientist like this. The scientist character was impossible and just did not hang together. Sorry very poor, unbelievable and I read somewhere about a Hitchcockian suspense atmosphere - well I assure you it's not. The love angle daughter is not up to it, and the male counterpart is a non starter. God, it's a bad bad film- oh I've said that already.

On first seeing this movie in the late 50's, one bomb in a guy's suitcase seemed mild since millions like me were facing full-scale nuclear war from the skies at any moment. At least this anguished soul (Jones) gives a week's warning. Now, of course, the baggage-check bomb looks suddenly prophetic and much scarier. One question to ponder is the logic behind the professor's threat. It's strictly utilitarian—better to lose a few million people than a few billion! After all, that same utilitarian calculus is typically used in wartime without controversy. Just how crazy, then, is this guy. Note that the screenplay avoids mention of this sort of irony or the question of its rationality.It's a tense film, but a curiously unemotional one, considering what's at stake. Perhaps it's the British tradition of stiff upper lip, or maybe the movie functions as an entertaining training film on how people should act during evacuation. But whatever the reason, no one gets very excited despite the apocalyptic threat. I suspect a Hollywood version would behave quite differently. At the same time, as someone who's never been to London, I enjoyed seeing the sights. And since many appear to be landmarks, likely the decades haven't changed much. Anyway, this has to be one of the few films on record to actually gain topicality after a 60- year passage and is well worth catching up with.(In passing— The 49th Man (1953) is the only Hollywood period film I know of dealing with the threat of a suitcase bomb. There, it's foreign agents smuggling A-bomb parts into US for later use. It might be helpful to point out that Soviet aviation was still a year away from a long-range delivery system.)

I was a child in Chelsea, London in 1950 so the scenes of this movie are somewhat familiar to me. I have always liked older British thrillers because they were all made with no nonsense or fat. This movie is another example of that. My complaint with modern British thrillers is that they are full of coarse language, as though this is the common currency in the UK. We don't hear one such word in this fine movie. I would show this to my young son when he gets to be 10.It is wonder to me that the makers were able to show many scenes of London, including a portion of Trafalgar Square as unoccupied by anyone. The characterizations were very good and the movie had a lot of suspense. I thought the professor was very agile to climb out of a back window, and then over walls. I know I would have a hard time doing that. I watch a lot of movies so I am trying to understand how I missed this one. If you want a sensible, suspense-filled, well-thought out film you would do well by watching this movie.

An unexpected masterpiece from the Boulting Brothers, "Seven Days to Noon" is an object - lesson in how to make a small - budget suspense movie .It works supremely well as such,but it is rather more than that.The "Atomic Age" was upon us,anti - communist propaganda was coming to a peak and nuclear sabres were being rattled. There was a real fear that World War three might indeed be the war to end all wars and everything else as well.In such a climate a scientist with a conscience might well decide to rattle a few sabres himself in the cause of what he considered the collective good. By threatening to explode a nuclear device in Central London within seven days unless all work on atomic weapons is suspended Mr B.Jones causes a very British panic i.e.things carry on much the same right up until the last moment,an Ealingesque concept if ever there was one. The Boulting Brothers' proposition that the atom bomb was "a bad thing" might seem to belong to the era of duffel coats,beards and open - toed sandals but in fact predates it by several years. Over half a century later it is glaringly obvious to Londoners that any bomb,whether it contains Uranium 235 or fertiliser is a very bad thing and to find one bomber in a big city is a task beyond human capability. By pointing this out to the public in 1950 the Boultings were breaking new ground. Don't watch it through 21st Century eyes then complain that people aren't like that -obviously they're not.But they were then. What you see is the way people behaved,the way they spoke and inter - acted as much as "Eastenders" reflects daily life in London now. People expressed anger,love and hatred without foaming at the mouth. Five years after the end of the war there was still a little of the "Let's all pull together" spirit abroad in the air.Everybody knew what it meant to be British but nobody spoke about it - the polar opposite of today. Although today the Boultings are best remembered for their comedies this little masterpiece from early in their career is a worthy contender for consideration as their finest work.