Chantage à la drogue

David Greene's assured direction makes this offbeat police thriller as notable as his first British film, The Shuttered Room, the previous year. Here he uses another fine jazz-score to counterpoint a sordid story (naïve rookie constable Michael York caught up in corruption in the London Metropolitan Police by detective Jeremy Kemp) with the same strange, almost dreamy quality.

By now, the anti-establishment Sixties was souring towards authority (compare the cynicism towards the police with, say, 1961's Jigsaw). But although initially Greene's telephoto camera-work gives the film a documentary feel, he proceeds to visualise Swinging London in almost David Hockney-like pictorial compositions (the shadow of a helicopter across the old Battersea power station, Susan George's kinky bedroom), all of which add to an unsettling air of unreality.

An oddity, but an original and arresting one.