Clash by Night [Escape by Night] ** (1964, Terence Longdon, Jennifer Jayne, Harry Fowler, Peter Sallis, Alan Wheatley, Vanda Godsell) – Classic Movie Review 11,221

A typical bunch of Sixties B-movie villains hijack a busload of mostly criminal passengers en route to jail to get their dangerous gang boss leader Bart Rennison (Tom Bowman) released, and the rest of the prisoners and warders are locked in a paraffin-soaked barn, in director Montgomery Tully’s small-scale, swift-moving, short-running (75 minutes) 1964 British black and white crime thriller Clash by Night [Escape by Night].

It stars Terence Longdon, Jennifer Jayne, Harry Fowler, Peter Sallis, Alan Wheatley, Vanda Godsell and John Arnatt as Inspector Croft.

Director Tully can’t manage that extra punch that would elevate it beyond its TV late-night movie graveyard status, and it fails to excite very much, though the efforts of the much more than reasonable cast do give it quite a lift, and it is for these iconic, hard-working Sixties actors that this low-budget filler is entertaining. Fowler, Sallis and Wheatley, especially, all make their mark.

The screenplay by Maurice J Wilson and Montgomery Tully is based on the novel Clash by Night by Rupert Croft-Crooke.

In the US its name was changed to Escape by Night to avoid confusion with the 1952 Barbara Stanwyck melodrama Clash by Night.

Also in the cast are Arthur Lovegrove, Mark Dignam, Richard Carpenter, Stanley Meadows, Robert Brown, Hilda Fenemore, Tom Bowman, and Ray Austin.

Alan Wheatley and John Arnatt are both fondly remembered for playing the Sheriff of Nottingham. Arnatt played the Deputy Sheriff of Nottingham in the fourth and final season of Richard Greene’s 1955-60 TV series The Adventures of Robin Hood, filling in for Alan Wheatley, who played the regular sheriff. In 1967 Arnatt played the High Sheriff of Nottingham opposite Barrie Ingham’s Robin in A Challenge for Robin Hood. Wheatley played the sheriff in 54 episodes between 1955 and 1959 but eventually withdrew from it.

Alan Wheatley’s last cinema role was Major Ronald Grey-Simmons in Clash by Night and in later years he worked mostly on radio, as actor, narrator and poetry reader. His final role was in 1991 in a BBC Radio 4 adaptation of A Day by the Sea, with his old friends Wendy Hiller and Michael Hordern.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,221

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