Hell Is a City in 35mm

Hell Is a City is a superb policier featuring Stanley Baker as Inspector Martineau, who hunts a murderer (John Crawford) while grappling with his crumbling marriage in the northern town of Manchester. Soaked in a jazzy score and paced with punchy dialogue, the film is one of several in this program in which an American is central to the story’s primary conflict (see also Night and the City, 1950, and Obsession, 1947).

This crime thriller is one of more than a dozen features made by the prolific Val Guest for Hammer Film Productions, the London-based company responsible for the bulk of England’s genre pictures from the 1930s into the 1970s. The film culminates in one of British crime... cinema’s most thrilling climaxes, shot on location atop a building in Manchester.

This 35mm print courtesy of the BFI National Archive.

Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.

1960 | 96 min. | UK | Black-and-White | English | Not Rated | 35mm

DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Val Guest  

WITH: Stanley Baker, John Crawford, Donald Pleasence, Maxine Audley