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 reason why this 76-year-old Ealing Studios film is still worth watching. Bogarde's very wired performance, with its nervous energy, sweatiness and constant sense of danger, could be compared to Richard Attenborough's Pinkie in Brighton Rock (1948), but it's more stylish and more youthful (Bogarde was 29 when he made it but looks much younger). We're still several years away from rock-and-roll - and decades away from punk - but Riley has already got elements of both: a heavy quiff which also ends up sticking out wildly and uncontrollably, a colourful tie and an exhuberant jacket with button-pocketing, and a sort of post-punk/beat look (buttoned-up striped shirt-jacket-hat combo). It's all quite roughed up and none of it's tidy or polite. Check out these images: 

This last one is especially good. Hanging out in his squalid rented room somewhere in Paddington, Riley is shown wearing this moth-eaten sweater, a proto-Johnny Rotten holed up in hiding from the police, while squabbling with his fellow criminal Spud (Patric Doonan) and considering ridding himself of his unreliable 17-year-old girlfriend Diana (Peggy Evans). The Blue Lamp undoubtedly saw itself as a fairly daring "realist" account of the police dealing with the post-war dregs of society - asocial hoodlums like Riley and Spud. Jack Warner's PC George Dixon was supposed to be the hero, as well as his amiable sidekick PC Andy Mitchell (Jimmy Handley). But all the energy and interest is with Riley. It might be pushing it to say that Bogarde's character prefigures the Teds and rock-and-roll as a symbol of rebellion, but Riley's street flash and sneering personality still come across as a sort of early version of the Teds, and even of punk. In this authority-worshipping film, Riley's volatility and antisocial threat were always going to be neutralised by the police, and that's exactly what happens. The Blue Lamp isn't content with this though. In its finale it goes further, showing us "regular" criminals and White City Stadium bookmakers joining forces with the boys in blue to help capture Riley. It's all very implausible but it seems the film needs to show us a cross-section of society doubling down on dangerous misfits like Riley. Yes, he was just that dangerous, that bad. It was apparently a frequent saying of Malcolm McLaren's grandmother Rose that, "To be bad is good because to be good is simply boring", and McLaren and Westwood's admiration for the antisocial danger represented by the stylish Teds was obviously a key part of their journey from Let It Rock, to Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die, to SEX. There's a dearth of decent music in The Blue Lamp (no moody neo-noir score, no jazz, no nothing worth hearing), but whenever Bogarde's on screen there's plenty of style and danger. Does Dirk wear white socks in The Blue Lamp? I couldn't be sure, but then again, I'd say ... definitely, yes.