The Siege of Sidney Street

Baker-Berman hardly rival Powell-Pressburger in the creative collaboration stakes. But their exploitations of various lurid bits of British history - see The Flesh and the Fiends, The Hellfire Club - aren't entirely negligible. This one's about the gang of anarchists led by the enigmatic Peter the Painter who peppered the East End with gunfire in 1910-11. The shoot-ups aren't bad, but apart from Wyngarde - why didn't he become a film star? - cops and robbers alike are a dull lot. Where the film scores is in its unexpected sympathy for the gang's agenda and in its thoughtful picture of a Victorian world of barrel organs and horse dung giving way to one of phones, cars and automatics. That's Jimmy Sangster as Winston Churchill in the climactic siege sequence.