Time Lock **** (1957, Robert Beatty, Lee Patterson, Betty McDowall, Vincent Winter) – Classic Movie Review 3775

Director Gerald Thomas’s neat little 1957 British black and white B-movie thriller film Time Lock is particularly tense and very satisfying, a first-rate exercise in suspense.

Vincent Winter plays a six-year-old boy who is accidentally trapped in a Toronto bank’s time locked vault with less than 12 hours of air left. It is the weekend and he is stuck in the vault for the entire period. Can the adults get him out before he suffocates?

Betty McDowall and Lee Patterson give first-class portraits of desperation as the terrified parents and Robert Beatty is his usual stalwart, ultra-calm-in-a-crisis, self as the vault expert called in to try to help.

Time Lock is expertly made, with no time wasted in a running time of just 73 minutes, by the Carry On creative team (producer/ writer Peter Rogers, director Gerald Thomas) just before they started Carrying On, starting with Carry On Sergeant (1958).

Rogers’s screenplay is based on Arthur (Airport) Hailey’s Canadian TV play.

At the bottom end of the cast is a pre-stardom Sean Connery as First Welder.

Also in the cast are Alan Gifford, Robert Ayres, Larry Cross, Sandra Francis, Gordon Tanner, Victor Wood, Jack Cunningham, Murray Kash, John Paul and Don Ewer.

Although set in Toronto, Canada, it was shot at Beaconsfield Studios, Buckinghamshire, UK, on a budget of just £30,000.

In one of the most peculiar of double bills, it went on general release in the US with Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) in July 1959.

The cast are Robert Beatty as Pete Dawson, Lee Patterson as Colin Walker, Betty McDowall as Lucille Walker, Vincent Winter as the boy Steven Walker, Robert Ayres as Inspector Andrews, Alan Gifford as George Foster, Larry Cross as Reporter, Sandra Francis as Evelyn Webb, Gordon Tanner as Dr Hewitson, Jack Cunningham as Max Jarvis, Victor Wood as Howard Zeeder, Peter Mannering as Dr Foy, Roland Brand as Police officer, Sean Connery as First Welder, Murray Kash as Second Welder, John Paul and Don Ewer.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3775

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