Flame in the Streets

Jacko Palmer is a union man arguing that a Black worker at the factory should be made foreman, which puts him at odds with his own friends. The same evening he comes home to learn that his daughter wants to marry a teacher from the West Indies. The film runs on those two tests colliding in a single day. The subject is not racism but the collision between principle and habit. Jacko is the man who is right at the factory and the man who cannot stand behind his own words at home. His wife Nell is the most honest character in the film, because she does not hide what she believes. The form is theatrical, played mostly in cramped interiors, and the tension keeps gathering in the same sitting room. Outside it is Guy Fawkes night, the street full of fire and noise, and the celebration rises at exactly the same rate as the argument indoors. It is adapted from Ted Willis's play Hot Summer Night. The production arrives just after anti-immigrant tension broke out on British streets, and it is one of the few films of its period to look at the subject directly. Roy Ward Baker directs. John Mills plays the father, Sylvia Syms the daughter and Brenda De Banzie the mother. Who it is for: viewers who like British social realism and political drama squeezed inside a family. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the subject handled in today's language; the film speaks in the vocabulary of its time and that is uncomfortable in places.