STRONGROOM
dir. Vernon Sewell, 1962
United Kingdom. 74 min.
In English.

When a trio of small-time crooks knock off a bank after closing time Friday evening, their robbery is interrupted by the cleaning crew and they imprison the bank manager and his assistant in the bank’s airtight vault or “strongroom” before escaping. Realizing later that Monday is an Easter Holiday and their captives will be trapped in the vault longer than they had first imagined and suffocate, and not wanting a murder on their conscience or on their rap sheets, they make a plan to break back into the bank to release them, while the bank manager and his secretary themselves fight for survival and plot their escape.

Though largely forgotten for many years, the film is enjoying a bit of rediscovery with rave reviews from Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright in an interview on the Empire Magazine Podcast. It also played earlier this year at the Noir City Film Festival in Seattle, Washington, where the film’s shocking ending both stunned and delighted the packed house of festival-goers. Sewell himself called it “a terrific movie.”

“…a very tense, humanly absorbing 80 minutes…” “This is Sewell’s most wholly achieved film…” -Brian McFarlane, BFI Screenonline