Additionally, as you can see above there are some fairly famous photographs of Ted Lewis and Michael Caine taken at the top of what has always been thought to be Frank Street. On occasion, he reminisces about his early youth – the last happy time he knew, we suspect – when he and Frank got on their bikes and explored the woods and wastelands on the outskirts of town. It’s one of those scenes when he knows words can take care of quite a lot so why bother with the action (at first anyway).

Gerald in his country hounds tooth and his lilac shirt, sitting at his Cintura-topped desk, the picture window behind him […] and Les sitting on the edge of the desk, in his corduroy suit, thumbing through a copy of Punch. In this, his second novel (his first one being the sorrowful, art-school love affair story entitled "All the Way Home and All the Night Through"), author Ted Lewis crafts a powerful crime drama in which there are no heroes.Chibnall has established that the film was shown on LWT in 1976 and 1980 "in a bowdlerised version" (which edited out Britt Ekland's phone sex scene) [76] and once on Westward Television and on Granada in August 1981, but it was not shown nationally and in its entirety until a post-watershed BBC broadcast in 1986. In financial trouble and shutting down its British operations, MGM was in the process of closing its British studios at Borehamwood [30] and was looking to make smaller-budget films to turn a profit. John Osborne, Bryan Mosley, Geraldine Moffat, Petra Markham, Dorothy White and the rest contributed a great deal in making the ‘trip up north’ quite a memorable (if not a little uncomfortable) experience. MGM agreed to a reasonable but below-average budget of 750,000 (there is some dispute as to whether this figure refers to dollars or pounds) [2] for the production.

The tops of the staithes as they appear in the film have been demolished; only the base of the structure remains. Usually we get all flash and no humanity, lots of fancy camera tricks but no feel for the criminal strata of society". There is intense violence in the book and yet at the same time there is incredible poetry to it all, particularly in the stunning ending (which was changed in both film versions).it was very influenced by Mike Hodges who has a very good eye for setups and he of course conferred with his operator and myself, but he influenced all of us, and much of the good look is due to him, I confess.