Plot
The action takes place in the area of London known as Paddington Green and is set in July 1949, just a few years after the end of World War II. P.C. George Dixon (Warner) a long-serving traditional "copper" who is due to retire shortly, takes a new recruit, Andy Mitchell (Hanley), under his aegis, introducing him to the easy-going night beat. Dixon is a classic Ealing 'ordinary' hero, but also anachronistic, unprepared and unable to answer the violence of Tom Riley (Bogarde). Called to the scene of a robbery at a local cinema, Dixon finds himself face-to-face with Riley, a desperate youth armed with a revolver. Dixon initially tries to talk Riley into surrendering the weapon, but Riley panics and fires. Dixon walks to his own death almost uncomprehending.
Dixon is taken to hospital, but dies some hours later. The ending is another Ealing quirk, with ordinary decent society, including 'professional' criminals used to violence, banding together to track down and catch the murderer, who is trapped in the crowd at White City greyhound track in west London. To Andy Mitchell falls the honour of arresting Riley.
Read more about this topic: The Blue Lamp
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)