Cash on Demand (1961) is one of my all-time favorite B-movies, one of my all-time favorite movies starring Peter Cushing, and while it had not previously occurred to me to classify it as a film noir proper as opposed to a beautifully twisty little two-hander of a character study by way of a bank job, I am grateful beyond words that TCM's Noir Alley chose to run it for their Christmas movie this year, because it's that, too. Produced by Hammer during one of their often overlooked forays into straight-up suspense, tautly directed by Quentin Lawrence from a screenplay by David T. Chantler and Lewis Greifer and crisply photographed by regular Hammer DP Arthur Grant, it runs 80 minutes without one wasted shot. It takes place very nearly in real time. It is as precise with its language as a good play. And despite containing not a second of sex, gore, or any action more physically violent than a man being hit across the face, nearly ten years on from my first viewing it remains one of the most idtastic films I know. 'Tis the season.
And it is the season, as we begin with your standard-issue street-corner Father Christmas shaking a tin for local charities under a holly-stenciled banner and the mellow strains of a carol. Beyond him lie the counters and offices and back stairs of a bank not yet open for business, ominously deserted spaces through which the camera roves even as far as the mechanisms of the vault, as if casing the joint. A reflection wavers in the brass name-plate of the "City & Colonial Bank, Haversham Branch." When it comes into focus, it turns out to belong to a thin-lipped man with cut-glass cheekbones and a bowler hat whose first act onscreen is the disapproving detection of an apparent smudge; his second is to let himself into the bank—handing off his snow-caked overshoes to one of the tellers—where his voice is confirmed just as cold and precise as the steel-rimmed ice-glint of his spectacles, putting an immediate freeze on any discussion of that evening's staff party. In his office, he straightens his scarf on the coatrack and tidies up his desk as if he's doing sums; his glance at a framed double photograph of a woman and child draws the smallest of smiles that already strikes us as uncharacteristically soft for this severe man, but the next minute he's checking the clock against his watch and preparing to call on the carpet the first employee of the day. Thus are we introduced to Harry Fordyce (Cushing), our for want of a less printable word hero. He's managed this bank for the last fifteen years and made a little tin god's holiday of it. He is about to have the worst morning of his life, but he doesn't know it yet. First the film is content to observe Fordyce in his natural habitat. He's a type familiar to anyone who has ever endured a bad office job—chilly, censorious, and micromanaging, whose fastidious enforcement of efficiency and decorum would be funny except for the climate of fear it produces in his staff. He dresses down his chief clerk Pearson (Richard Vernon) over an inky pen as if it were a girlie magazine left lying open at the centerfold. A matter of ten pounds accidentally overdrawn and replaced the next day becomes, as he grills the confused and then incredulous teller Harvill (Barry Lowe), a dark intimation of embezzlement and conspiracy. He has a knack for dismissive, impersonal phrases like "I am not in the least interested in," "I am not in the habit of," and "Perhaps you don't think," this last especially associated with moral aspersions. Perhaps most meanly of all, he won't even permit a grandmotherly secretary (Edith Sharpe) to keep her Christmas cards on her desk: "Banking is one of the few dignified businesses left in the world, Miss Pringle. Do you mind terribly if we keep it that way?" In short, he is without humor, without empathy, and Cushing's fine-boned patrician mien only emphasizes the man's pettiness: to waste that ascetic hauteur bullying five clerks in a village bank is a damn near crying shame.
Nothing that brittle can go without breaking, however, and the first crack is the arrival, in a rather fine Maserati 3500 GT, of Colonel Gore-Hepburn (André Morell). A shrewd, hearty man with an aristocratic drawl that makes an etiolated joke of Fordyce's clipped correctness and an affable manner that engages the bank's beaten-down employees as much it throws their boss off his buttoned-up stride, he introduces himself as a head office investigator from the Home and Mercantile Bankers' Insurance making the rounds of a routine security check-up, stocks and alarms and all that sort of thing. Actually he is a bank robber and he has selected Fordyce to assist him. The proposition is simple: if the man who calls himself Gore-Hepburn is allowed to leave within the hour with £90,000 and no interference from the police, Fordyce's wife and child will not be subjected to deranging, potentially fatal electroshock. Should Fordyce at any stage of this process call for help, refuse to comply, or lose his head and give the game away . . . One terrified, cut-off phone call is nightmare fuel enough: "She would never recover her wits." White-faced, still imagining on some level that this catastrophe can't be happening to him, Fordyce agrees. ( They're all I've got. )
In case it's not obvious, I cannot praise Cushing enough in this role. I found the film in 2010 because the BFI claimed it was his best performance; it was instantly indelible for me. Always an intensely physical actor, he builds his difficult character as much out of mannerisms as dialogue, finely shaded and strong as mime. At self-conscious moments, Fordyce has a habit of rising on his toes as if drawing himself to attention, straightening his tie like the gestural equivalent of a nervous cough; it is absurd and annoying and ultimately touching, like so much of the man himself. He's a prim beanpole when arrogant, a gangling butterfingers when terrified. Not once could you imagine him vaulting a flight of stairs like Van Helsing or briskly plying a scalpel like Baron Frankenstein. It's the same body; there's someone else inside it. Morell is no slouch himself, I should acknowledge; he had played O'Brien to Cushing's Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) and Watson to his Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and here offers a blend of menace, showmanship, and what might be either genuine humanism or merely self-amusement. There is something of the big cat about him, the mellifluous rumble of his voice, the smiling detachment with which he studies Fordyce and the ambiguity of his claim, "I can't help interesting myself in people." I enjoy his almost sexual purr as he answers the question of what he wants with "Oh, just some money," but his one break into violence really shocks in a movie so otherwise tightly, emotionally wound. The rest of the cast are not immaterial, especially the long-suffering Pearson, the amiable Sanderson (Norman Bird), and the canny Inspector Mason (Kevin Stoney), but it really is Morell's show and Cushing's, Cushing's most of all. Ultimately he's playing a kind of Christmastime fantasy, one of those solstitial shocks to the system you get around this time of year, but thanks to the smallest gestures like the opening of a pocketbook or the mopping of a brow, we never once doubt the reality of Harry Fordyce, even if we're just as glad not to have known him before this December the 23rd. The film earns its play-out of "The First Noel," is what I'm saying, and increasingly I don't say that about almost anything. This position brought to you by my interested backers at Patreon.
And it is the season, as we begin with your standard-issue street-corner Father Christmas shaking a tin for local charities under a holly-stenciled banner and the mellow strains of a carol. Beyond him lie the counters and offices and back stairs of a bank not yet open for business, ominously deserted spaces through which the camera roves even as far as the mechanisms of the vault, as if casing the joint. A reflection wavers in the brass name-plate of the "City & Colonial Bank, Haversham Branch." When it comes into focus, it turns out to belong to a thin-lipped man with cut-glass cheekbones and a bowler hat whose first act onscreen is the disapproving detection of an apparent smudge; his second is to let himself into the bank—handing off his snow-caked overshoes to one of the tellers—where his voice is confirmed just as cold and precise as the steel-rimmed ice-glint of his spectacles, putting an immediate freeze on any discussion of that evening's staff party. In his office, he straightens his scarf on the coatrack and tidies up his desk as if he's doing sums; his glance at a framed double photograph of a woman and child draws the smallest of smiles that already strikes us as uncharacteristically soft for this severe man, but the next minute he's checking the clock against his watch and preparing to call on the carpet the first employee of the day. Thus are we introduced to Harry Fordyce (Cushing), our for want of a less printable word hero. He's managed this bank for the last fifteen years and made a little tin god's holiday of it. He is about to have the worst morning of his life, but he doesn't know it yet. First the film is content to observe Fordyce in his natural habitat. He's a type familiar to anyone who has ever endured a bad office job—chilly, censorious, and micromanaging, whose fastidious enforcement of efficiency and decorum would be funny except for the climate of fear it produces in his staff. He dresses down his chief clerk Pearson (Richard Vernon) over an inky pen as if it were a girlie magazine left lying open at the centerfold. A matter of ten pounds accidentally overdrawn and replaced the next day becomes, as he grills the confused and then incredulous teller Harvill (Barry Lowe), a dark intimation of embezzlement and conspiracy. He has a knack for dismissive, impersonal phrases like "I am not in the least interested in," "I am not in the habit of," and "Perhaps you don't think," this last especially associated with moral aspersions. Perhaps most meanly of all, he won't even permit a grandmotherly secretary (Edith Sharpe) to keep her Christmas cards on her desk: "Banking is one of the few dignified businesses left in the world, Miss Pringle. Do you mind terribly if we keep it that way?" In short, he is without humor, without empathy, and Cushing's fine-boned patrician mien only emphasizes the man's pettiness: to waste that ascetic hauteur bullying five clerks in a village bank is a damn near crying shame.
Nothing that brittle can go without breaking, however, and the first crack is the arrival, in a rather fine Maserati 3500 GT, of Colonel Gore-Hepburn (André Morell). A shrewd, hearty man with an aristocratic drawl that makes an etiolated joke of Fordyce's clipped correctness and an affable manner that engages the bank's beaten-down employees as much it throws their boss off his buttoned-up stride, he introduces himself as a head office investigator from the Home and Mercantile Bankers' Insurance making the rounds of a routine security check-up, stocks and alarms and all that sort of thing. Actually he is a bank robber and he has selected Fordyce to assist him. The proposition is simple: if the man who calls himself Gore-Hepburn is allowed to leave within the hour with £90,000 and no interference from the police, Fordyce's wife and child will not be subjected to deranging, potentially fatal electroshock. Should Fordyce at any stage of this process call for help, refuse to comply, or lose his head and give the game away . . . One terrified, cut-off phone call is nightmare fuel enough: "She would never recover her wits." White-faced, still imagining on some level that this catastrophe can't be happening to him, Fordyce agrees. ( They're all I've got. )
In case it's not obvious, I cannot praise Cushing enough in this role. I found the film in 2010 because the BFI claimed it was his best performance; it was instantly indelible for me. Always an intensely physical actor, he builds his difficult character as much out of mannerisms as dialogue, finely shaded and strong as mime. At self-conscious moments, Fordyce has a habit of rising on his toes as if drawing himself to attention, straightening his tie like the gestural equivalent of a nervous cough; it is absurd and annoying and ultimately touching, like so much of the man himself. He's a prim beanpole when arrogant, a gangling butterfingers when terrified. Not once could you imagine him vaulting a flight of stairs like Van Helsing or briskly plying a scalpel like Baron Frankenstein. It's the same body; there's someone else inside it. Morell is no slouch himself, I should acknowledge; he had played O'Brien to Cushing's Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) and Watson to his Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and here offers a blend of menace, showmanship, and what might be either genuine humanism or merely self-amusement. There is something of the big cat about him, the mellifluous rumble of his voice, the smiling detachment with which he studies Fordyce and the ambiguity of his claim, "I can't help interesting myself in people." I enjoy his almost sexual purr as he answers the question of what he wants with "Oh, just some money," but his one break into violence really shocks in a movie so otherwise tightly, emotionally wound. The rest of the cast are not immaterial, especially the long-suffering Pearson, the amiable Sanderson (Norman Bird), and the canny Inspector Mason (Kevin Stoney), but it really is Morell's show and Cushing's, Cushing's most of all. Ultimately he's playing a kind of Christmastime fantasy, one of those solstitial shocks to the system you get around this time of year, but thanks to the smallest gestures like the opening of a pocketbook or the mopping of a brow, we never once doubt the reality of Harry Fordyce, even if we're just as glad not to have known him before this December the 23rd. The film earns its play-out of "The First Noel," is what I'm saying, and increasingly I don't say that about almost anything. This position brought to you by my interested backers at Patreon.
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