Kitchen sink or swim? No Trees in the Street (1959)

There are aspects of this film that remind me of the previous year’s Violent Playground directed by Basil Dearden and featuring Stanley Baker as a policeman with a soft spot for a working-class woman (Anne Heywood) and who tries to stop her brother (David McCallum) from turning bad, in Liverpool of all places. In Ted Willis’ story, there’s the same triangle with the added spice of a charismatic gangster played with vulnerable intensity by Herbert Lom.

There was clearly something in the air in a post-war Britain concerned about the direction of youth and criminality and Ted Willis, growing up in working-class Tottenham, was closer to it than many writers of the time. His father had been a bus driver and leaving school early he had been told by his headmaster to learn a decent trade as 'You will never make a writer in a hundred years. You haven't got the imagination for it or the intelligence…' I’m sure this was well-intentioned but Willis persisted serving in the Army Kinematograph Service during the war and gaining success as a playwright and script writer.

Willis wrote No Trees as a play in 1948 and adapted it for this film directed by J. Lee Thompson and described the story as being "Loosely based on characters I'd met in childhood in the dingy back streets of Tottenham, I think I wrote it to exorcise certain ghosts." In this Thompson’s film is perhaps better at detailing the world of the time than the dramatic choices of its main characters. The set up is an impressive one mostly set in the claustrophobic constraints of a single street reminding me of many a silent film backdropped against such tableaux – think of King Vidor’s masterpiece The Crowd not to mention Italian neo-realist films from earlier in the fifties.

It's a time capsule of Fifties style and shops, and the beginnings of multi-cultural Britain as well as one with limited opportunities for many. At the heart of the story is a family living in one of the tenements, Hetty (Sylvia Syms) and her younger brother Tommy (Melvyn Hayes) and their mother Jess (Joan Miller) who is more interested in having a good time than parenting. Clearly she had Hetty early on and perhaps out of wedlock as folk used to say and has missed out on the luxury of being young and free. She entertains Kipper (Stanley Holloway) who is full of fun and usually brings beer along to lubricate his story telling.

The film starts with a flashback as plain-clothed copper Frank (Ronald Howard) chases a knife-carrying thug across a landscape of new tower blacks mixed with demolished streets either still left over from the War or knocked down by councils looking to improve conditions for the communities they have uprooted. Frank catches the young lad, called Kenny and played by a Mr David Hemmings, and tries to pass on the benefits of his experience. Initially Kenny is resistant but he and we are about to be transported back to the late 40s and a world away.

Tommy is the Kenny of his day and Melvyn Hayes is splendidly wired, perhaps too wired… he’s reached the age at which he wants to strike out on his own and prove himself and is torn between the good advice of his straight-laced sister Hetty and the powerful example set by local kingpin, Wilkie (Herbert Lom) who has his eye on the lad but won’t push him, partly out of respect for his sister. He gives Tommy a try out but the lad gets nervous and blows the job forcing him to go into hiding and this is where the film gets bogged down.

Herbert Lom and Sylvia Syms

Lom, Syms and Hayes are all good performers but as a three with this plot and this director, they just don’t meld. Syms and Hayes are unlikely siblings whilst the maturity of the former clashes with the forceful yet too hyperkinetic presentation from the latter. It’s as if they’re in two different films and this is surely down to the director as much as anything else. Lom and Syms also lack chemistry no matter how much technique is deployed perhaps the script just doesn’t give the couple enough reason to be romantically aligned. There are moments but nothing to compare with the best of either’s work.

It's all a bit predictable but still not without merit and it looks fabulous on the latest restored print as used for the Studio Canal Blu-ray which I watched and which was screened with a Melvyn Hayes Q&A last year – one I’m very sorry to have missed. There are moments here when he really does capture the angry young men spirit and the fire inside his Hollywood heroes but overall, it’s an occasional stretch and that’s not his fault but the adaptation.

Similarly, with Hetty and Wilkie, there’s a spark in the latter’s inability to trust and to truly give himself to love, with only the slightest misunderstanding all it takes to drive him back into his shell and to lash out. But I personally couldn’t see how the relationship would work for Hetty other than as an escape or to help support her brother but these are not behaviours you’d expect from her character who has presumably already decided on her moral stance on these issues having grown up in this environment.

Plenty of cemras in the streets...

Dusty Verdict: ANYWAY… I still recommend the film… fabulous atmosphere and you can almost smell those streets. It is dramatically satisfying too and even with those weaknesses the main cast are all eminently watchable – Lom and Syms especially are great technicians and there probably is a more believable relationship in there because of their skill “off the ball” and the set narrative. It’s as if they add sub-text of their own which is definitely something Sylvia talked of with other films such as The World Ten Times Over.

Also. Stanley Holloway is lovable and roguish as always, looking on the bright side of life and all to aware of the slings and the arrows. Mr Hayes, gives his all and it ain’t ‘alf hot when he’s on screen which is why, in spite of the mixed critical reception the film had at the time, you have to give it more reverence now as a document of the emerging talents of the time as well as the view it gives of a society in the midst of change. ALL films date because time moves on, but they also become historically significant in the process.

The Studio Canal Blu-ray looks fantastic so well worth the upgrade, you can buy it from all good online retailers and those shops on the bigger high streets!

There's a decent score from Laurie Johnson which was released on a flexi disc to promote the film... scour the charity shops to see if you can find it!!