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You couldn’t hope for a better cast than we find in The Wrong Arm of the Law: Peter Sellers, John Le Messurier, Bernard Cribbins, Nanette Newman… It’s a snapshot of British cinema, 1962.

The premise is simple, yet clever. Three conmen, newly arrived from Australia, are moving in on the territory of London’s two biggest gangs; one headed up by Sellers, the other by Cribbins, who is in his element, and surprisingly versatile, as an Irish crime boss. When either gang does a job the trio is there, posing as policemen, confiscating the loot and making off.

Now the gangs are the victims, and a meeting is convened. The city’s pick-pockets, forgers and petty thieves gather to vote on the best course of action and settle on a coalition with the police, working together to catch the despicable characters stealing their ill-gotten gains.

But of course it goes awry. The police put too much faith in the gangs; they second one of their staff to them, they set up a sting, and they collude in staging a robbery in the hope of setting a thief to catch a thief.

And yet the most criminal aspect of this film is the underuse of its leads. Sellers switches effortlessly between cockney crime lord and his wannabe French fashion designer cover throughout the film, adopting a far better accent than we ever heard from Cluesoe’s lips, and yet despite his pivotal role, his impact is small. Perhaps it’s that we now expect too much of him, in the light of later, more memorable performances.

Le Messurier doesn’t appear until the latter half, and then more or less plays Wilson, straight out of from Dad’s Army. Cribbins takes second billing to Sellers, despite the fact we’d like to see more of this role wears like a second skin. Newman is the female interest, without whom the film would have no story, yet her role is used for nothing more than pushing the plot along.

Of most interest, then, is the cityscape, in this film set largely out of doors. We see the Battersea Park Carnival (with Michael Caine apparently in the background as an extra), cutting-edge cars with 1962 tax discs, ‘hip’ London streets dark but for the glow of white-on-black neon, planes we’d dread using today because they boast neither the comfort nor the safety of a modern jet.

It is a simple story, at heart, competently told at a steady pace, but over the intervening 40 years it had become little more than a historical curiosity, showing modern day viewers what Britain was once like, how some of our best-known stars spent the early monochrome years of their careers, and how gentle and inoffensive comedy used to be.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 16th, 2005 at 7:47 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.