A pre-Bond Sean Connery is among the gifted cast in this 1961 mob drama that takes in the highlights of
London lowlife
There’s a blue-chip cast for this tasty 1961 Brit noir, a brash and brassy mob drama in the bright lights of London’s Soho and the West End – the world of Dassin’s Night and the City. Alfred Marks plays Harry Foulcher, a creepy club owner whose supposedly legitimate business is a front for a protection racket, putting the arm on smalltime pubs and dives for a tenner a week. His crooked accountant Waldo Zhernikov, played with gorgeous insinuation by Herbert Lom, persuades Harry to sit down with all the other cauliflower-eared villains to form a profitable London-wide syndicate, to the disgust of the hard-nosed honest copper Detective Inspector Sayers, robustly played by John Gregson. These gangsters need a cool tough guy to collect the larger sums coming in, so they recruit a cat burglar called Paddy Damion, an ordinary decent criminal who needs the money … played by pre-007 Sean Connery.