The Good Die Young (1954) - film review

Four men, all law abiding citizens, decide to rob a mail van.  Mike is a retired boxer who is unable to find work after having had his hand amputated.   Joe is an unemployed office clerk who needs money to return to the United States with his pregnant wife.  Eddie is a US airman who has deserted after learning that his wife, a famous actress, has been having an affair with her director.  Rave considers himself a gentleman of leisure, sponging off his wife, until she decides she no longer wants to underwrite his dissolute lifestyle.  Four men, each desperate to make easy money.  All they have to do is to steal a few sacks of used notes from a mail van and all their problems will be over...

One of the few true film noir crime dramas to be made in Britain, The Good Die Young benefits from a mixed Anglo-American cast which gives it a realism and harder edge than many contemporary British thrillers.  Directed by Lewis Gilbert, one of Britain’s most prolific filmmakers, best known for the three Bond movies he made in the 1970s.  Gilbert had no qualms about borrowing some of the familiar motifs of American film noir, and employed these expertly to create a tense and suspenseful drama with a particularly gripping denouement.

Laurence Harvey makes a slick and rather sinister villain in the charming Tom Ripley psychopath tradition; he would later marry Margaret Leighton, who plays his wife in the film, and would hit the big time when he starred in Room at the Top (1959), which was directed by Jack Clayton, who was executive produce on this film.  The film features Joan Collins in her last British film before Howard Hawks hired her as his leading lady in Land of the Pharaohs (1955), launching her international career.

Admittedly, the plot is painfully contrived, veering towards the kind of over-egged melodrama that even by the mid 1950s had become dated.  However, the superb direction and faultless performances more than make up for the deficiencies in the script.  The Good Die Young is essential viewing for any devotee of the British crime thriller, offering a foretaste of the stylish hardboiled thrillers which were to explode onto cinema screens in the following decades.

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