A Christmas Robbery

It's Christmas movie time of year again, and if a movie ties Christmas to crime, so much the better. One in this vein I like that I first saw only a few years ago, a good neo-noir film capturing a dark but thoroughly holiday spirit, is the British film Cash on Demand. It's from 1961 and directed by Quentin Lawrence. Lawrence is not a household name, but during his career in the 1960s and 70s, he did a few films and a lot of TV work, including an episode of The Avengers. This is a film he did for Hammer Films, and as such, it's a great reminder that during their heyday, Hammer didn't turn out only horror movies. With a tight running time of 80 minutes, Cash on Demand is a crisply shot black and white bank robbery film. Hammer stalwarts Peter Cushing and Andre Morrell, who played Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson in Hammer’s 1959 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles, star in it, and they’re as sharp and effective here as they are in the many period films they each did.

We’re in a small British town, two days before Christmas.  Morrell, posing as an insurance investigator, enters the bank Cushing manages and proceeds to calmly convince him that his cohorts are holding Cushing’s wife and son hostage at their home.  He then walks Cushing through how the two of them will open the bank’s vault and take the money inside and how Cushing will help him get the loot out of the bank in suitcases Morrell has brought.  The interesting thing is that Morrell’s professional thief, erudite and droll, a warm personality despite the menace he conveys, is more likable than Cushing’s manager.  From the moment we first see Cushing enter the bank in the morning, we know he’s a cold and unyielding man.  He’s obsessed with efficiency, mean to his conscientious head clerk, and aloof from the rest of his staff.  In no time at all, with a few simple movements as he arranges things, we get the sense that he may be an obsessive-compulsive type. Everything has to be just so.   Imagine how it must make his skin prickle, how it must upset his entire system, to have to subordinate himself to someone who has the upper hand on him.

In the numerous films I’ve seen Peter Cushing in, I can’t recall him giving a bad performance. He’s always so focused and believable, even when the script is weak. He always gives his characters layers. In Cash on Demand, he has a strong script to work with and a well-developed person to embody, and he makes the most of it. The movie unfolds in real time, on a few indoor sets, and it doesn’t take place during Christmas season for nothing.  By its end, in a most unexpected way, the story has revealed itself as a variation on A Christmas Carol.  It’s low budget filmmaking quite well-done, the Hammer pros delivering the goods again.

You want Christmas and crime in a movie, if you haven't seen it, give Cash on Demand a shot. You can find it on Amazon Prime, and there's an excellent print of it on You Tube.