THE GOOD DIE YOUNG (1954)

While not quite in the same class as THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN, Lewis Gilbert's THE GOOD DIE YOUNG can lay fair claim to being a minor classic British heist movie. Four guys who are having various kinds of trouble with money and women find themselves drawn together in a pub and set about planning the robbery of a Post Office van carrying used bank notes. There is Laurence Harvey as a good looking bounder whose rich wife (Margaret Leighton) will no longer support him, Richard Basehart who needs to take his pregnant wife (a very pretty Joan Collins) away from her scheming mother, Stanley Baker as an amputee boxer who finds his wife (Rene Ray) has lost his savings helping her no good brother and John Ireland as an American serviceman married to an unfaithful starlet wife (Gloria Grahame at her gorgeous sluttish best). These back stories are told in some detail but hold the interest until the heist itself - an amatuer job (Jack Hawkins would have laughed his socks off) that is totally botched leading to a pursuit through the dark streets, railway stations and churchyards of post war London. Nicely shot in the Film Noir style and mainly told in flashback from a point just before the robbery the film certainly held my interest - even on what is at least my third viewing. The supporting cast has some interesting names including Freda (BRIDES OF DRACULA, MONSTER OF TERROR etc) Jackson as the mother-in-law from hell and Robert Morley as Harvey's father. The leads are all convincing with Harvey and Baker being particularly good. In the scene prior to the actual boxing match watch for the arrival in the background of a young boxer - if I'm not mistaken that is a very young Edward Judd. In the first pub scene there is a young man with black hair standing by a piano who looks remarkably like the singer Michael Holliday who was popular in the mid to late Fifties - anybody know for certain? Rating ***