One could be forgiven for not suspecting that Hammer Films,
known for their comparatively lurid and bloody, sometimes pointedly lusty, and
otherwise vividly imagined (and reimagined) catalogue of horror classics, would
be the first place to look if one were in the market for a low-key yet spirited
take on a holiday classic to turn to once the perennial screenings of It’s a
Wonderful Life, White Christmas, Die Hard and countless other popular
titles have begun to wear out their welcome. Yet the studio delivered just that
in Cash on Demand (1962), a dandy and delicious suspense thriller
directed by Quentin Lawrence, from a script by David T. Chantler and Lewis
Griefer, itself based on a play by Jacques Gillies, which echoes of Charles
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the book and the countless movie and TV
iterations which came before, to fresh and potent purpose.
Lawrence, a British TV veteran whose few feature film credits included The Man Who Finally Died (1963; itself based on a British TV series for which Lawrence shot several episodes), a Hammer follow-up to the infamous WWII potboiler Camp on Blood Island entitled The Secret of Blood Island (1965), and, perhaps most memorably for those of us well-versed in the Hammer output (though it was not itself a Hammer film), 1958’s The Crawling Eye, directs Cash on Demand with crisp efficiency and seductive simplicity that draws the viewer into its wintry setting with ease and assurance. But it is the players who populate this intense chamber piece—it takes place entirely within a small community bank located an hour or so outside London—who create the film’s most lasting impression.
One of the best things about Cash on Demand is the
relative subtlety with which it references the Dickens classic—it’s possible to
not even notice the resemblance until you’re snared in the movie’s novel web.
But even though it’s not ultimately a full-fledged refashioning of Dickens’ familiar
tale, this film most certainly has its own Ebenezer Scrooge, its own Bob Cratchit,
and even a personification of a specter with less than honorable intentions who
nonetheless nudges the Scrooge figure toward a self-realization that is
entirely in line with the original story’s emotional denouement.
The movie opens on a snowbound scene just outside the bank, where a man in a Santa suit is collecting for a local hospital charity, with the familiar carol “The First Noel” lilting on the soundtrack. But as the camera moves in on the metal placard just outside the bank’s door which identifies it as the City and Colonial Bank of Haversham, a musical strain is introduced that sounds at first as if it might be an orchestral ornament to the carol but which quickly evolves into a minor-key evocation of uncertain dread as the camera goes inside and moves through the empty spaces soon to be filled with employees and the occasional customer.
Soon those employees begin to populate their workstations, led by Mr. Pearson, the head clerk who stands in for Cratchit. Pearson is essayed with palpable empathy by veteran character actor Richard Vernon (Goldfinger, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, The Pink Panther Strikes Again). The head clerk’s vaguely worn countenance bespeaks the weariness of a man stuck in a professional position which offers little reward other than vague security, yet also of a kindness that has probably carried him further with his own subordinates than it does with his immediate superior.
That immediate superior is, of course, Cash on Demand’s Scrooge figure, the bank’s detail-obsessed, meticulously efficient manager Harry Fordyce, played with imperious reserve by one of Hammer’s greatest stars, Peter Cushing. When Fordyce enters the bank the already wintry atmosphere chills a few degrees further, each employee registering the degree of their boss’s daily, surely countless demands on their performance, and none more so than Pearson, whose professional competence and morality Fordyce calls into question almost immediately over a discovered imbalance in the daily books, the result of a charitable loan to a customer proffered by another clerk, which Pearson signed off on and which Fordyce inflates into a career-threatening charge of embezzlement.
Cushing, at least initially, offers no quarter against the impenetrable air of superiority Fordyce is able to indulge within his little realm. But unlike Scrooge, Fordyce appears to have no large wealth to claim as his own, which might make lording his power over his employees an easier path to take. Fordyce is, it’s fairly clear, a small man in his own right, without friends or connections apart from his immediate family, and embodying his pettiness is a task perfectly suited to Cushing’s wheelhouse. But as Fordyce is forced to confront the limits of his own worldview, and to come to understand how he has so frequently come up short in the humanity department, the shades of desperation, of isolation, of helplessness that are encased beneath Fordyce’s icy exterior begin to rise to the fore, and it’s here that Cushing, an actor able to imbue even his most extreme and ideologically entrenched characters with welcome shadings of understanding and clarity, begins to breathes real life into Fordyce and craft what I, as an unrepentant Cushing devotee, consider to be one of his two or three best, most compelling performances. (For another one of those, please see, if you haven’t already, his fanatical Gustav Weil in Hammer’s magnificent Twins of Evil, in which he gifts the religious zealot given charge over voluptuous twins who come under the influence of a vampire lord with a similar and unexpected sympathy.)
But what of Dickens’s ghosts? Fordyce himself first appears as an eerie reflection in that City and Colonial placard, an apparition which eventually takes human form and begins tending to an unoffending smudge on the placard’s shiny surface with a handkerchief. But in Cash on Demand, the real analog to those chain-rattling specters Dickens used to compel his protagonist into self-awareness takes corporeal shape as Colonel Gore-Hepburn, a cordial, if officious and perhaps overly self-assured gentleman who initially presents himself to the bank staff as an insurance inspector in order to get an audience with their boss and eventually reveals a more sinister purpose once ensconced within the confines of Fordyce’s office.
Gore-Hepburn is played by the terrific and always-welcome André Morell, veteran of scores of Hammer productions as well as mainstream classics like Ben-Hur and The Bridge on the River Kwai, whose most indelible impression upon genre aficionados may have come as the persistently enquiring Professor Bernard Quatermass, who literally uncovers evidence of extraterrestrial life in a London Underground excavation in the original British TV production of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit (1958). As the ex-military man, Morell deals in unctuous insinuation as if casually breathing the icy Haversham air, and he relishes his power over Fordyce from his first words, when Fordyce still believes him to be who he represents himself to be. But when Gore-Hepburn pulls back the curtain and reveals his actual identity and agenda, the charm Morell has exuded, and which he will be required to occasionally tap into again through a more threatening veil, disappears in favor of a decidedly less welcoming persona. Gore-Hepburn is actually a career criminal who has been casing the bank for over a year and has begun executing a well-thought-out plan to relieve the City and Colonial of its holiday reserve of over 90,000 pounds, a plan which includes holding Fordyce’s wife and son hostage under threat of torture and execution if the bank manager does not acquiesce to his every demand. It’s a great role for Morell, who clearly is having the time of his life playing the greater evil against Cushing’s misguided man of appearances and procedures, and together they deliver one of the most formidable one-two acting punches in the history of Hammer Studios.
Through the procession of events in which Fordyce is forced to squirm and betray his own principled stature as a banker of apparently peerless standards at Gore-Hepburn’s relentless insistence, the dramatic twists and turns which propel Cash on Demand never seem only like overwrought dramatic contrivances, and much credit for that has to go to these wonderful actors. The push-pull between Gore-Hepburn’s dominion of the situation and Fordyce‘s increasing desperation play with theatrical artifice, to be sure, but then so do Dickens’s. However, within the framework in which those conventions and artifices have been refashioned, the Cash on Demand company artfully deliver on their conceit with palpable relish, and with awareness of just how to deliver Fordyce to his particular personal and professional epiphanies (which, for Fordyce, are most certainly and inevitably intertwined) in a satisfying minor key befitting the resolution of an otherwise nerve-racking cat-and-mouse scenario which must echo, but never blatantly ape, the Dickensian formula in order to arrival at its own particular destination.
The resolution that Cash on Demand does come to I daresay will satisfy connoisseurs of crime and suspense as well as those in search of the restorative holiday balm that Dickens’s tale has delivered for generations, yet without the need to insist upon itself within the trappings of a traditional holiday classic. Maybe that’s one of the main reasons why it has become exactly that for me.
***********************************
Lawrence, a British TV veteran whose few feature film credits included The Man Who Finally Died (1963; itself based on a British TV series for which Lawrence shot several episodes), a Hammer follow-up to the infamous WWII potboiler Camp on Blood Island entitled The Secret of Blood Island (1965), and, perhaps most memorably for those of us well-versed in the Hammer output (though it was not itself a Hammer film), 1958’s The Crawling Eye, directs Cash on Demand with crisp efficiency and seductive simplicity that draws the viewer into its wintry setting with ease and assurance. But it is the players who populate this intense chamber piece—it takes place entirely within a small community bank located an hour or so outside London—who create the film’s most lasting impression.
The movie opens on a snowbound scene just outside the bank, where a man in a Santa suit is collecting for a local hospital charity, with the familiar carol “The First Noel” lilting on the soundtrack. But as the camera moves in on the metal placard just outside the bank’s door which identifies it as the City and Colonial Bank of Haversham, a musical strain is introduced that sounds at first as if it might be an orchestral ornament to the carol but which quickly evolves into a minor-key evocation of uncertain dread as the camera goes inside and moves through the empty spaces soon to be filled with employees and the occasional customer.
Soon those employees begin to populate their workstations, led by Mr. Pearson, the head clerk who stands in for Cratchit. Pearson is essayed with palpable empathy by veteran character actor Richard Vernon (Goldfinger, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, The Pink Panther Strikes Again). The head clerk’s vaguely worn countenance bespeaks the weariness of a man stuck in a professional position which offers little reward other than vague security, yet also of a kindness that has probably carried him further with his own subordinates than it does with his immediate superior.
That immediate superior is, of course, Cash on Demand’s Scrooge figure, the bank’s detail-obsessed, meticulously efficient manager Harry Fordyce, played with imperious reserve by one of Hammer’s greatest stars, Peter Cushing. When Fordyce enters the bank the already wintry atmosphere chills a few degrees further, each employee registering the degree of their boss’s daily, surely countless demands on their performance, and none more so than Pearson, whose professional competence and morality Fordyce calls into question almost immediately over a discovered imbalance in the daily books, the result of a charitable loan to a customer proffered by another clerk, which Pearson signed off on and which Fordyce inflates into a career-threatening charge of embezzlement.
Cushing, at least initially, offers no quarter against the impenetrable air of superiority Fordyce is able to indulge within his little realm. But unlike Scrooge, Fordyce appears to have no large wealth to claim as his own, which might make lording his power over his employees an easier path to take. Fordyce is, it’s fairly clear, a small man in his own right, without friends or connections apart from his immediate family, and embodying his pettiness is a task perfectly suited to Cushing’s wheelhouse. But as Fordyce is forced to confront the limits of his own worldview, and to come to understand how he has so frequently come up short in the humanity department, the shades of desperation, of isolation, of helplessness that are encased beneath Fordyce’s icy exterior begin to rise to the fore, and it’s here that Cushing, an actor able to imbue even his most extreme and ideologically entrenched characters with welcome shadings of understanding and clarity, begins to breathes real life into Fordyce and craft what I, as an unrepentant Cushing devotee, consider to be one of his two or three best, most compelling performances. (For another one of those, please see, if you haven’t already, his fanatical Gustav Weil in Hammer’s magnificent Twins of Evil, in which he gifts the religious zealot given charge over voluptuous twins who come under the influence of a vampire lord with a similar and unexpected sympathy.)
But what of Dickens’s ghosts? Fordyce himself first appears as an eerie reflection in that City and Colonial placard, an apparition which eventually takes human form and begins tending to an unoffending smudge on the placard’s shiny surface with a handkerchief. But in Cash on Demand, the real analog to those chain-rattling specters Dickens used to compel his protagonist into self-awareness takes corporeal shape as Colonel Gore-Hepburn, a cordial, if officious and perhaps overly self-assured gentleman who initially presents himself to the bank staff as an insurance inspector in order to get an audience with their boss and eventually reveals a more sinister purpose once ensconced within the confines of Fordyce’s office.
Gore-Hepburn is played by the terrific and always-welcome André Morell, veteran of scores of Hammer productions as well as mainstream classics like Ben-Hur and The Bridge on the River Kwai, whose most indelible impression upon genre aficionados may have come as the persistently enquiring Professor Bernard Quatermass, who literally uncovers evidence of extraterrestrial life in a London Underground excavation in the original British TV production of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass and the Pit (1958). As the ex-military man, Morell deals in unctuous insinuation as if casually breathing the icy Haversham air, and he relishes his power over Fordyce from his first words, when Fordyce still believes him to be who he represents himself to be. But when Gore-Hepburn pulls back the curtain and reveals his actual identity and agenda, the charm Morell has exuded, and which he will be required to occasionally tap into again through a more threatening veil, disappears in favor of a decidedly less welcoming persona. Gore-Hepburn is actually a career criminal who has been casing the bank for over a year and has begun executing a well-thought-out plan to relieve the City and Colonial of its holiday reserve of over 90,000 pounds, a plan which includes holding Fordyce’s wife and son hostage under threat of torture and execution if the bank manager does not acquiesce to his every demand. It’s a great role for Morell, who clearly is having the time of his life playing the greater evil against Cushing’s misguided man of appearances and procedures, and together they deliver one of the most formidable one-two acting punches in the history of Hammer Studios.
Through the procession of events in which Fordyce is forced to squirm and betray his own principled stature as a banker of apparently peerless standards at Gore-Hepburn’s relentless insistence, the dramatic twists and turns which propel Cash on Demand never seem only like overwrought dramatic contrivances, and much credit for that has to go to these wonderful actors. The push-pull between Gore-Hepburn’s dominion of the situation and Fordyce‘s increasing desperation play with theatrical artifice, to be sure, but then so do Dickens’s. However, within the framework in which those conventions and artifices have been refashioned, the Cash on Demand company artfully deliver on their conceit with palpable relish, and with awareness of just how to deliver Fordyce to his particular personal and professional epiphanies (which, for Fordyce, are most certainly and inevitably intertwined) in a satisfying minor key befitting the resolution of an otherwise nerve-racking cat-and-mouse scenario which must echo, but never blatantly ape, the Dickensian formula in order to arrival at its own particular destination.
The resolution that Cash on Demand does come to I daresay will satisfy connoisseurs of crime and suspense as well as those in search of the restorative holiday balm that Dickens’s tale has delivered for generations, yet without the need to insist upon itself within the trappings of a traditional holiday classic. Maybe that’s one of the main reasons why it has become exactly that for me.
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Thanks for posting this. As you may know, this has long been a favorite of mine, and I was able to get it included in Icons of Suspense, the last of three Columbia/Hammer box sets I managed to put together before Sony got tired of releasing "that old black-and-white shit."
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