The Secret Place

Clive Donner’s The Secret Place is set in the ugly, dirty, ramshackle East End of postwar London where bombed out ruins, empty lots, and dilapidated flats appear to trap residents in their fates, an unfitting backdrop for the young, fresh, and beautiful Molly Wilson (Belinda Lee). Essentially a diamond heist film, The Secret Place could also be considered a “children’s noir” if there were such a thing as Molly’s fourteen-year-old admirer Freddie Haywood (Michael Brooke) enables the heist by secretly loaning out his father’s police uniform, and the neighborhood kids inadvertently help the police solve the case by way of a stray diamond that they swap around like a baseball card. The perpetrators are Molly’s smarmy boyfriend Gerry Carter (Ronald Lewis), who pressures Molly to apply her charms on Freddie, and Steve Warring (Michael Gwynn), the nervous sidekick who tries to back out at the last minute. After the heist in Hatton Garden and the getaway go off without a hitch, Gerry hides the diamonds, but when they disappear, he’ll stop at nothing to get them back. The robbery scene is both simple and suspenseful, the U-shaped layout of the office and its window exposure allowing us to see who is coming about a minute in advance. If Donner meant to depict England’s hope and promise after the war, we might conclude that he’s a pessimist given the wreckage on display, but he creates beautiful moments out of the mess, such as the evening sky backdrop through the picture window as Molly and Gerry embrace in their dream apartment or the final chase in the moonlit, labyrinthine ruins up and down the abandoned scaffolding. Sad note on Belinda Lee: touted as one of England’s greatest and most glamorous up-and-coming movie stars, Lee went on to make another 20 or so films across Europe, including the excellent noir Satan Tempts with Love (1960) in Germany, before dying in a car accident at the young age of 25.