Stars:
Alastair Sim,
Jack Warner,
Valerie White,
Harry Fowler,
Frederick Piper,
Jack Lambert,
Gerald Fox,
Douglas Barr
Director:
Charles Crichton
Summary: A bunch of East End lads discover that their favourite boys' paper is being used by crooks to pass secret information. So they set about trying to confuse things. The first Ealing comedy.
Street boys throw rocks as the credits for HUE AND CRY appear behind them, among the grafitti on a brick wall. Director Charles Crichton's camera pans across London's Docklands. Joe (Harry Fowler), one of the street boys, reads from a Blood and Thunder comic. Enthralled, he finds he is walking down the streets mentioned in the comic, as the action from the comic appears to unfold before him--a truck with the same number plate stops, men unload large crates looking like those in the comic, a man with a moustache waits outside. With hardly a thought, Joe is spying. He is caught but, after being interviewed by the police, finds he has a job in Covent Garden, and a puzzle to solve. Joe's gang discovers the comic is being used to send coded messages to gangs of criminals. Nobody believes them--so they set out to investigate themselves. The memorable, climactic sequence sees a huge swarm of boys attempting to round up the baddies through the London's 1940s docklands.
With fine performances by Fowler, Joan Dowling as the gang's only girl, Alastair Sim as the timid author of the bloodthirsty stories, and Jack Warner as Joe's boss, with T.E.B. Clarke's cunning script and Crichton's direction, HUE AND CRY snowballs from realism to fantastic thriller as it plays out in London's bomb-stricken streets.