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The day begins with a truck spraying the dirty streets of Soho, and the dustbins being emptied. But there’s a feeling that this, the once notorious red light district of London, will never be really clean. A moving camera captures the facias of Indian, Chinese and French eateries. It’s a 9 to 5 world – 9pm to 5am; one of smoke-filled rooms, Italian coffee bars, street markets, backroom poker games all captured in its original grim seediness by cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky (he was also a gifted photographer and documentary maker).
Sammy (Anthony Newley) is the emcee in a grubby strip club whose gambling debts have caught up with him and he owes £300 (£6,000 in today’s money). Two heavies have come to collect and he’s got five hours to find the cash or face a beating or a permanent razor scar on his face. At the same time he has to appear in front of the curtain between sets at the Peepshow club to crack lame jokes and introduce the girls. Jerry (Robert Stephens) is the slimy club owner who takes a fancy to decorative newcomer Patsy (Julia Foster), Sammy’s girlfriend just arrived from ‘oop North’. She is an innocent abroad as wide-eyed as a Sindy doll.
For Sammy, life is complicated. He traverses London in a desperate attempt to beg, borrow or steal enough to pay off the goons, encountering on his way a bunch of character actors (Wilfrid Brambell, Derek Nimmo, Roy Kinnear, Warren Mitchell) who were to become TV favourites in the later 60’s and 70’s.
What lets the film down is the central performance. Newley was a song-and-dance man (by all accounts a rather unlikeable one). He co-wrote the Goldfinger theme and ended his career as a Vegas lounge act. Newley captures well the cheeky chappie facet of Sammy Lee, but audiences will struggle to believe that Sammy’s a desperate man ducking and diving, trapped in a relentless cycle of his own failure. In his marathon across the city Sammy sometimes looks like a young Max Bygraves running for a bus rather than someone running for his life.
Towards the end – when Sammy’s passion is spent and it looks like he’s a lost man – there is a short, powerful monologue where he addresses the punters at the strip joint. He tells them how pathetic they are and how it’s all tease and no strip. The girls really hate those eyes out there in the dark staring at them. But just like the punters Sammy can’t turn his back on them.