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The latest production from Ealing Studios unavoidably challenges comparison with Hollywood in style and verisimilitude; it must be said that comparison on all major counts is unfavourable. The story, in outline, is no more nor less conventional than that of The Naked City or The Street With No Name: a pair of young crooks, starting with robbery but ending with the murder of a P.C., are traced, tracked and finally captured by the police and the C.I.D. The method is semi-locational: camera units covered various parts of London, including Ladbroke Grove, the Edgware Road, Cranbourne Street and the White City. The routine of police investigation is carefully documented. Where The Blue Lamp attempts more than most current Hollywood thrillers is in its "humanisation" of the police force, its horde of minor "characters".

The latest production from Ealing Studios unavoidably challenges comparison with Hollywood in style and verisimilitude; it must be said that comparison on all major counts is unfavourable. The story, in outline, is no more nor less conventional than that of The Naked City or The Street With No Name: a pair of young crooks, starting with robbery but ending with the murder of a P.C., are traced, tracked and finally captured by the police and the C.I.D. The method is semi-locational: camera units covered various parts of London, including Ladbroke Grove, the Edgware Road, Cranbourne Street and the White City. The routine of police investigation is carefully documented. Where The Blue Lamp attempts more than most current Hollywood thrillers is in its "humanisation" of the police force, its horde of minor "characters".

In the choice of actors lies one fatal flaw of the film. The two main policemen played by Jimmy Hanley and Jack Warner (the latter's wife is again played by Gladys Henson). Warner and Hanley have been presenting allegedly authentic British types on the screen for at least five years; by now their personalities are wholly tabloid. Their dialogue – quips, quirks and Cockney bonhomie – is effectively prefabricated. Scotland Yard, represented mainly by Robert Flemyng, upholds the public school tradition, converses in clipped, earnest phrases reminiscent of a prefect's meeting.

The representation of criminals is less conventional in so far as the actors, Patric Doonan and Dirk Bogarde, have individuality and flair, but inevitably one of them inhabits an immaculately flyblown room right on top of the underground railway, and his girl-friend is a peculiar amalgam of Ealing and Hollywood - the inept Purley blonde, trying to masquerade under a Cockney accent (Ealing), alternately kissed and slapped (Hollywood), and worked up by the director to a state of perpetual hysteria. Comic relief on Hartley's and Wamer's night beats is provided by such staunch representatives of the depressed classes as Dora Bryan (excitable trollop) and Betty Ann Davies (sluttish downtrodden wife).

One has only to compare such scenes as Gladys Henson reacting to the death of her husband, P.C. Warner, with Adelaide Klein (the mother of the murdered girl) being interviewed by the police in The Naked City, or the effortless menage of Richard Widmark and his floozy in The Street With No Name with the painstakingly squalid tiffs between Bogarde and Peggy Evans, to see how spurious is the attempt here at characterisation. The American films may only be two-dimensional, but at least they achieve a spontaneous and convincing re-presentation of the orthodox. The attempt in The Blue Lamp to go beyond this, to put all kinds of Real British Life on the screen, results in the mixture of coyness, patronage and naive theatricality which has vitiated British films for the last ten years, and which has been admirably defined by Richard Winnington as "Huggettry." This, it need hardly be added, is now a serious offence. Technically, The Blue Lamp is capable: Basil Dearden displays his usual fondness for melodramatic angles and the occasional shock-cut. One or two sequences are well put together; but to revert to The Street With No Name, the effect as a whole is less satisfactory than that achieved by one of Hollywood's unostentatious artisans, William Keighley. The location work cannot compare in range or variety with Dassin's in The Naked City.

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