Innocent Meeting

saw this film as a B movie sometime in the 1960s alongside a more well known film. It opens with a nice posh middle class girl in a record shop buying a classical record where she meets a leather jacketed working class boy who is buying pop music. It ends on a roof with him with a gun having committed a criminal offence and she is pleading with him to give himself up to the police. I thought when i saw it it it had been retitled as innocent encounter.Its a love affair between a middle class girl and a working class boy, which was seen as unusual back in 1958

Juvenile delinquency was a growing social problem in Britain in the 1950s.As the country got back on its feet after WW11, teenagers suddenly found more money in their pockets as jobs were plentiful in the post war economy.This drama features Sean Lynch who plays a working class orphan but artistically talented teenager who meets a nice middle class girl in a record shop and protects her from some bully boys when she wants to buy a long playing record of Tchaikovsky's music instead of the fashionable beat records favoured by the local youths.Beth Rogan plays the girl who gradually falls in love with the character played by Sean Lynch.She has a liberal father (Raymond Huntley) who owns a fabric factory and is predisposed to give Sean a job as an artistic designer in his fabrics department.One day the father loses his wallet with £50 in it and suspicion falls on Sean who is accused as he already has a police record and he loses his coveted job.Things then go from bad to worse and he returns to his old illegal haunts with the delinquent crowd with which he formerly mixed.

I would guess "Innocent Meeting" was a "B" feature which in British cinemas in the 1950s could be expected before "The Big Feature".I noticed Robert Dorning character actor who played in several "Hancock's Half Hour" comic TV episodes back then, and who here played a reporter hoping for a scoop.With a limited budget the film was adequate and I saw it today for the first time and I rated it 6/10.

Sean Lynch is on probation, assigned to Ian Fleming, when he meets Beth Rogan in a music shop. Soon, they are getting on like a house on fire and she gets him a job as a design apprentice in her father's fabric factory. When his wallet turns up missing, however, he's accused and let go and winds up holding off the police with a gun.

This second feature is full of well-meaning intentions about the need to give youngsters a chance lest they tread an evil path, but it falls too quickly into melodramatic claptrap, abetted by a score that uses Tschaikovsky as its major theme. Alas, Mr. Lynch offers a sullen, almost whiny performance, Miss Rogan is a perky nullity, Mr. Fleming is well meaning but droning and ineffectual.... and makes the message of the film look futile. Nicholas Roeg is the camera operator for Jimmy Wilson as the cinematographer, and together they don't offer anything more interesting than shots lifted from 1930s crime dramas. Like far too many of the Danziger Brothers' productions, it takes what had worked in the past, offers it anew and results in a something utterly forgettable.

I expected little from this film, but after watching it I felt deeply moved by it. First I must mention the two young leads; Sean Lynch and Beth Rogan. Both of them showed, in my opinion, great promise as both give excellent performances. Lynch plays a young man from a disturbed family background, and in a sense of revolt towards society becomes a petty criminal. Released on bail me meets a young woman played by Beth Rogan, and they fall in love. This may sound banal but the intensity of their love for each other means everything to them, and by a misunderstanding of theft Lynch once more turns to crime as he needs money for them to marry. No spoilers but many scenes are set to Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, which somehow raises the film to another level. I am sure at the time it was a risk to use this music without it being tampered with or distorted, and it succeeds. The ending is overwhelmingly moving and I wonder why this fine film is not better known. A lot is played out in the last of the 1950's years, and it is evocative for those still alive in remembering those London streets, now so radically changed. Above all I regret that the two leads are no longer with us, and also a deeper regret that they arguably were not given even more equal cinematic chances to show their worth. In my opinion a minor masterpiece in film making.

Well a Danziger film is hardly likely to be original and this is true to form.The main problem with this film is Sean Lynch.He is supposed to be a young tearaway from Hammersmith but sounds as if he had just stepped out of drama school.Raymond Huntley as a sympathetic potential father n law is hardly typecasting.Anyway it passes an hour painlessly.