The Blue Lamp

The Blue Lamp was an immensely popular British crime film (and the winner of the BFA Award), concentrating on interrelated episodes in the lives of several London policemen. Jack Warner heads the cast as George Dixon, a veteran "bobby" who is murdered by scuzzy small-time criminals Dirk Bogarde and ...more

Basil Dearden's The Blue Lamp was one of the more notably successful dramas to come from Ealing Studios, a production company much better known at the time for its comedies. One can see the antecedents that Dearden and screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke drew from for certain elements of their work -- the opening borrows from Alfred Hitchcock's intro to Blackmail, with a shot of a police car pulling away from a station and running in hot pursuit of a vehicle, with a shootout ensuing in which a bystander ...more