Strongroom

Maybe these days Vernon Sewell is better known for the Hammeresque horror films he did at the end of his career, but among other things he did a number of tense noir crime thrillers. They were less about the shenanigans of gangsters and femme fatales and more about fate and the inexorable situations that crime traps people in.

Strongroom came out in 1962 as a B movie supporting a now forgotten picture. The criminal premise is initially simple. Three men - brothers Alec and Len Warren (W Morgan Sheppard and Keith Faulkner) and their partner in a breakers' yard, Griff (Derren Nesbitt) - pull off a bank heist. They get in and get out. With no connection to the criminal underworld they will be unsuspected. All the evidence will be broken up for scrap before anyone is any the wiser. They have cased the place and chosen the Easter bank holiday to do the deed. Things quickly become not so simple.

Dressed as a postman, Griff gets past the bank's door with a final delivery and the brothers burst in. They grab the bank manager, Mr. Spencer (Colin Gordon), and his secretary Rose Taylor (Ann Lynn), and head for the vault. Unexpectedly, the bank's cleaning ladies turn up. The bank staff are left in the vault. The charladies, after doing a cursory job, leave, and the crooks make their escape, leaving behind one fatal mistake: two people in an airtight vault. Realising what they have done, the robbers concoct an over-elaborate plan to have them released. But this goes wrong when one of the brothers, Alec, is killed in a car crash. The claws of fate are closing on everyone.

Sewell's camera is claustrophobic. The lens is in the actors' personal space, the interiors are dark and shadowy. As actors, Faulkner and Nesbitt have already worked well before in another of Sewell's films, The Man In The Back Seat. Here their roles are somewhat reversed but the chemistry between then is very strong. Gordon and Lynn have their moments in the vault when Lynn isn't being directed towards the histrionic. In places she is being pushed out of character towards audience expectations. The man has to be practical and the woman has to fall to pieces, 1960s everyday sexism.

There are three traps in Strongroom. The first, obviously is the bank vault. Rose and Mr. Spencer are in there through no fault of their own. The situation is simply imposed on them, victims of force majeure. The second one is the one the robbers build for themselves. They are trapped between conscience and expediency, and then by the trail of evidence they leave behind as they try and put things right. Finally there is Mr. Spencer's personal trap. It is there only in a couple of lines of dialogue. He didn't want to be a banker; his parents pressured him into it. He wanted to go into printing. Maybe he wasn't an artist but he could have been part of the process of making it, putting it into the world. Instead he has spent years suffocating in a bank.

One criticism of the film is its improbability. This is unfair. Apart from one single act of fate, the car crash, everything else follows a pattern of mundane inevitability. Consequences follow actions. The cleaning ladies turn up at the wrong time because it is going to be a bank holiday - of course the routine of the bank is going to be disturbed. Even the car crash isn't that improbable. Back in the 1960's road deaths were three to four times what they are today with only about one sixth of the vehicles on the roads and a lower population. It was something that was just more common.

Reviewed on: 20 Feb 2026