Dirk wears a flowered tie: the rock-and-roll energy of The Blue Lamp
There's a scene in The Blue Lamp (1950), the film that launched the "bobbie on the beat" pro-police propaganda series Dixon Of Dock Green, where a bedraggled little girl playing in a desolate bombsite area replies to questions from a detective oozing supercilious public school charm by saying, "My dad said I was never to talk to coppers". Who can blame her? Or the father? For working-class people, especially ones with any kind of mental health issue or for people from ethnic minorities, contact with the police has often been ruinous. Made with the cooperation of the Metropolitan Police, The Blue Lamp isn't interested in these kinds of subtleties. It's a pretty straightforward (read: tedious) account of dedicated, warm-hearted police officers out to get thuggish, sneering crims. People like ... Dirk Bogarde. Yep, because Bogarde's Tom Riley, an edgy junior villain who wants to make his mark and progress to the criminal big time, is surely the only r...
