Customs Movies: River Patrol and Forbidden Cargo

 


Looking at how HM Customs and Excise was portrayed in the movies, the list is relatively small. I can only think of two.

River Patrol. 1948. One of the earliest post-war Hammer Films, it was written by film editor James Corbett and directed by Ben R. Hart. Made at Marylebone Studios (appropriately, a deconsecrated church) it stars cheeky John Blythe as Robby Robinson, a Waterguard officer who sees one of his crew shot and murdered during an interception on the Thames. When the smugglers cruiser opens fire with a machine gun, Robinson retaliates with an automatic pistol! Not sure that 20th century Waterguard officers were ever officially entitled to bear arms, but maybe the pistol was a souvenir Robby brought back from the war.

Unfortunately, the film veers into Harry Enfield territory in a statically directed scene where Robby returns to headquarters and turns off the wireless in the canteen to mourn his colleagues death. Hungry for revenge, Robby is teamed with Jean Nichols (Lorna Dean) to pose as whisky smugglers and infiltrate the gang led by Wally Patch as The Guv (Patch had played the Bos’un of the Revenue Men in the 1937 George Arliss version of Doctor Syn). Booze is only a sideline for the Guv’s drinking clubs, and the big haul is 20,000 nylon stockings smuggled over from France. The film ends with what looks like an improvised fight between Blythe and Patch on the staircase of a warehouse before the rest of the Waterguard charge in to save the day.



Forbidden Cargo. 1954. Made by the Rank Organisation at Pinewood with a script by producer Sydney Box and directed by Harold French, the film is made in semi-documentary style with obvious co-operation from H.M.Customs and Excise. Posters warned cinema-goers that, “It is important to see this film from the beginning.” The film opens with a montage voiceover by Jack Warner: “The great majority of the public are honest enough, but you always get a few smart alecs who try to avoid paying their whack. And for them, the Waterguard – they’re the chaps in uniform you meet at the port – are the country’s first line of defence. But to deal with the big gangs, Customs and Excise has it’s own CID, the Investigation Branch.”

Nigel Patrick plays Customs investigator Michael Kenyon who uncovers a heroin smuggling ring. Reviewing the film C.A. Lejeune* said, “the trail takes Mr Patrick to the Mediterranean and a luxury yacht, where a beautiful fashion model (Elizabeth Sellars) and her handsome but clearly graceless brother (Terence Morgan) are enjoying the sun and indulging in a remarkable lot of underwater swimming. An attempt to join them in this exercise nearly results in Mr Patrick’s murder. And so back to London and the inevitable chase through night streets black and sleek with rain. Not bad, and I understand the Customs people give the film good marks for authenticity.” The Streatham News added that, “the photography has a constantly factual atmosphere, spoilt only by the inevitable car chase being taken at improbable speed.” The climactic attempt to jump a rising Tower Bridge was, of course, imitated by the Duke years later in Brannigan (1975). Michael Bayer on the Heart of Noir website notes that, “cinematographer C.Pennington-Richards experiments with highlights, shadows, and deep focus, especially whenever the action moves to abandoned streets or watercraft decks at night (note the elegant fistfight depicted as silhouetted figures in front of white curtain brightly lit from behind.”

The film is strong on the opening and closing procedural scenes with a number of now familiar character actors depicting the customs net closing in on the gang (John Arnatt, John Horsley and Cyril Chamberlain among them). The gang is also ramped up with star power, not only Greta Gynt (Dark Eyes of London) and Theodore Bikel (the original Fiddler On The Roof), but also Brian Wilde and Eric Pohlmann. Jack Warner plays the Senior Investigation Officer, called Major Alec White (presumably keeping his retired military rank from the war). 


The first quarter of the movie is stolen by Joyce Grenfell as a birdwatcher who alerts customs to the smuggling gang dropping shipments of booze at a bird sanctuary in East Anglia. As C.A. Lejeune noted Grenfell was, “One of the few actresses I know who can bring an instantaneous ripple of laughter through a theatre at her first appearance…she takes the young officer under her wing, lends him her hide as an HQ, (“but you will be jolly quiet won’t you). She is a treat, both funny and warm-hearted. “

*C.A.Lejeune, Smugglers and Spotted Fever, The Sketch, May 5, 1954.

Streatham News, 11 June 1954


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