No Trees in the Street ** (1959, Sylvia Syms, Herbert Lom, Joan Miller, Melvyn Hayes, Stanley Holloway, Liam Redmond, Ronald Howard, Carole Lesley, Lana Morris) – Classic Movie Review 12,413

Ted Willis adapts his 1948 kitchen sink stage play about a poor late-1930s cockney family for director J Lee Thompson’s well-meaning but over-heated and faded 1959 British crime thriller drama film No Trees in the Street, set in the slums of London.

In the badly dated and unpersuasive crime plot, a sluttish mother, Jess (Joan Miller), stands by while a crooked bookmaker spiv, Wilkie (Herbert Lom), seduces a slum girl called Hetty (Sylvia Syms) and turns her thieving teenage brother Tommy (Melvyn Hayes) into a murderer.

In the romantic subplot, Hetty first becomes Wilkie’s girlfriend and her mother Jess (Miller) even tries to marry her off to Wilkie. But then Hetty becomes involved with local plain clothes police detective Frank (Ronald Howard), who is in love with her. Twenty years on, surrounded by new 1950s East End high-rise flats, Frank narrates the film’s story to young tearaway Kenny (David Hemmings), showing how different things were in the late 1930s when the area was packed with overcrowded tenements full of unemployed people with no hope.

No Trees in the Street seems too hysterical and preachy as a prime example of the British kitchen sink realism film of the 1950s, undermining its attempt at a naturalistic depiction of 1930s slum life. But the performances from an interesting cast offer some considerable compensation. Syms’s still touching performance is the best thing about it, a bit of a revelation, while two other actors show their class. Lom and Holloway are cast for practised performances they have given before that fit them like the proverbial glove. Lom’s Wilkie is suave and unpleasant, and Holloway’s bookie’s tout Kipper is comically charming. Typecast here, Lom proved a versatile performer, and was a skilled comic actor as Chief Inspector Dreyfus in The Pink Panther franchise, eg A Shot in the Dark (1964).

The cast are Sylvia Syms as Hetty, Herbert Lom as Wilkie, Melvyn Hayes as Tommy, Ronald Howard as Frank, Stanley Holloway as Kipper, Joan Miller as Jess, Liam Redmond as Bill, David Hemmings as Kenny, Carole Lesley as Lova, Lily Kann as Mrs Jacobson, Lloyd Lamble as Superintendent, Campbell Singer as Inspector, Marianne Stone as Mrs Jokel, Rita Webb as Mrs  Brown, Lana Morris as Marje, Lana Morris, and Edwin Richfield.

Melvyn Hayes receives ‘and introducing’ credit.

Willis, Thompson and Syms had worked together on Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957).

Filming began 10 March 1958.

[Spoiler alert] Unusually for a British film of the time, it was changed after previews, with new scenes added at the opening, and at the end showing the detective married the sister and living in a new council flat after the slums are demolished.

No Trees in the Street (1959, Sylvia Syms).

The much loved English actress Sylvia Syms OBE (6 January 1934 – 27 January 2023) is best known for the films Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), Ice Cold in Alex (1958), The Moonraker (1958), Expresso Bongo (1959), No Trees in the Street (1959), Victim (1961), The Punch and Judy Man (1963), The Tamarind Seed (1974), and The Queen (2006), in which she played The Queen Mother.

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,413

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