Hell Is a City

Hell Is a City (1960)

Murder money stained his hands....

Set in Manchester, heartland of England's industrial north, Don Starling escapes from jail becoming England's most wanted man. Ruthless villain Starling together with his cronies engineered a robbery that resulted in the violent death of a young girl. Detective Inspector Martineau has been assigned to hunt him down and bring him in. From seedy barrooms, through gambling dens the trail leads to an explosive climax high on the rooftops of the city.

Date of release
1960-04-10
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (35)
Runtime
1h 38m
Genres
Thriller, Crime
Director
Val Guest

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: £115K

Hell Is a City is a 1960 British crime thriller film directed by Val Guest and starring Stanley Baker, John Crawford and Donald Pleasence. It was written by Guest based on the 1954 novel of the same title by Maurice Procter, and made by British studio Hammer Film Productions on location in Manchester. It was partly inspired by the British New Wave films and resembles American film noir. Filming ran from 21 September 1959 to 5 November 1959, and the film was trade shown on 11 March 1960 and again on 10 April 1960. This was Stanley Baker's second and last film for Hammer, because after he appeared in Zulu (1964), Hammer could no longer afford him.

Production

In a 1988 interview, Val Guest said: "Mike Carreras fell for the book, he liked it very much and gave to me to read, then he bought the rights from ABP [Associated British Picture Corporation] 'cos they were never going to make it, and we made it on location, and the whole thing was this Detective Inspector Martineau … and this very human detective, tough, rough, but human with his own problems at home, with a wife who nagged, falling for a barma…

Guest and Stanley Baker had just made Yesterday's Enemy together.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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