Handsomely shot almost entirely on location and enhanced (like so many films unworthy of her) by the presence of the lynx-eyed Kathleen Byron. Like so many films of its era it evokes a time when life in Britain was a crushing daily struggle in the face of postwar austerity and honest folk had to be warned off the lure of easy money and kept on the straight and narrow by morality tales such as this, with threats of "dire penalties" for transgressors.
The film begins with a priest visiting the hero in prison to give him absolution of the eve of his execution, so we already know where this is going to end, the suspense lying instead in figuring out precisely how things are going to go pear-shaped and justify the title. At its heart lies the shifting expectations of how the nature of the relationships between the main characters will eventually pan out; and what eventually does happen is arrived at satisfactorily surprisingly and vividly justifies the title.
The film begins with a priest visiting the hero in prison to give him absolution of the eve of his execution, so we already know where this is going to end, the suspense lying instead in figuring out precisely how things are going to go pear-shaped and justify the title. At its heart lies the shifting expectations of how the nature of the relationships between the main characters will eventually pan out; and what eventually does happen is arrived at satisfactorily surprisingly and vividly justifies the title.