Wide Boy

The British term “wide boy” denotes a young man who lives by his wits, something like a con man, the term referring to his being wide awake. In Ken Hughes’s simple, compact, gripping noir, Wide Boy, the title character isn’t the widest boy of the bunch but lucks out when he stumbles upon a neglected purse in a bar and finds a potential goldmine inside. Sydney Tafler plays Benny, the small-time crook who lives in a shabby, one-room flat and strives to impress his “wage slave” hairdresser girlfriend Molly (Susan Shaw) by striking it rich (“Don’t you want to see how the other half live?”). One evening, when he pinches a wallet from the aforementioned purse, his reward is far more than the cash inside: it turns out it contains a handwritten love letter confirming an extramarital affair with a famous, wealthy surgeon with political ambitions. Through phone calls and secret meetups, Benny successfully parlays this find into a steady stream of blackmail income, but, since we’re in noir territory, things will get out of hand, and lives will be extinguished. Hughes and crew bring a pronounced noir sensibility to every scene, abandoned buildings serving as seas of shadows where secret rendezvous take place, lamplit side streets and alleys furnish escape routes, and, in a brilliant final sequence, a tunnel serves as a trap in which police silhouettes close in from both sides as a train roars down the tracks overhead.