Cash on Demand

Cash on Demand is a 1961 British black and white second feature neo noir crime thriller film directed by Quentin Lawrence and starring Peter Cushing and André Morell. The screenplay was adapted from the 1960 Associated Television Theatre 70 teleplay The Gold Inside, also directed by Lawrence, and featuring André Morell and Richard Vernon in the same roles.

Plot
Two days before Christmas, a bogus insurance investigator, Gore Hepburn, brazenly conducts a con trick on a bank, largely through making Fordyce the bank manager believe that his family have been kidnapped.

Fordyce is a cold, officious man. Gore Hepburn recognises the insecurities underlying Fordyce's behaviour and exploits them ruthlessly, tormenting him with veiled threats.

Feeling that he has no choice, Fordyce helps Gore Hepburn to steal £93,000 in banknotes from the bank vault, concealing his actions from the rest of the staff. However, they have already phoned Gore Hepburn's insurance company as a routine precaution, and discovered that he is an impostor.

When Fordyce learns the police are on their way he becomes desperate for his family's safety. When police arrive Fordyce convinces Pearson to cover for him and excuse the bank staff contacting the police as a misplaced cheque.

Police have already arrested Col Gore Hepburn, who has a case containing the bank's money. Gore Hepburn is not his real name; he is a known criminal. Police suspect he must have had inside help with the robbery, which points to Fordyce.

A quick call establishes that Fordyce's family were never under threat. Fordyce tries to convince the police that the colonel deceived him; for instance, by ordering him at one point to stand by the window and mop his brow, as a signal to a supposed associate outside. As he demonstrates this to the officers, a sealed bank package of £500 (which Gore Hepburn had slipped into his pocket earlier) falls out. Once more the police are sceptical of his innocence. Gore Hepburn tells the police that Hepburn and another man used a tape recorder to disguise their voices and make it seem like Fordyce's family was kidnapped, and that Fordyce is innocent.

Fordyce is finally seen as innocent and the police let him go. Knowing his wife and son are safe, he has changed his opinion of his co-workers for helping him. He goes to the police station with them to talk to his wife and to Hepburn for deceiving him. With a half-smile on his face, he tells Pearson to manage the bank in his absence, assuring him he will be back in a few hours and join them at the staff Christmas party.

Cast

 * Peter Cushing as Harry Fordyce
 * André Morell as Colonel Gore Hepburn (as Andre Morell)
 * Richard Vernon as Pearson
 * Norman Bird as Arthur Sanderson
 * Kevin Stoney as Detective Inspector Bill Mason
 * Barry Lowe as Peter Harvill
 * Edith Sharpe as Miss Pringle
 * Lois Daine as Sally
 * Alan Haywood as Kane

Production
Hammer Film Productions invested approximately £37,000 to produce the film. To optimise its budget the film uses a limited number of sets; an interior street set, the trading area of a bank, the manager's office, the stairway between office and the vault, and the interior of the vault itself.

Release
Columbia Pictures began distribution of the film in the United States on 20 December 1961, and screenings continued until April in some major cities.

Critical reception
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Set from first to last in a small country bank, this is a neat and quite freshly conceived robbery thriller. There is no violence (only the threat of violence), yet the menace is more pronounced than in many films relying on physical brutality. Once the preliminaries are over and the story begins to unfold, the tenseness of the situation is maintained with considerable success right through to the concluding stages. The only weak point is the business of the wife's telephone call, which is finally revealed as false: much of the plot's conviction rests on this circumstance, which is inadequately explained by a vague reference to an impersonation and a trick with a tape recorder. Otherwise the story is watertight, terse and gripping. Andre Morell's performance as the thief is a little too deliberately phony, perhaps, but Peter Cushing is impressive as the prim bank manager, and there is a nice cameo from Richard Vernon as the cashier."

Cash on Demand was selected by the film historians Steve Chibnall and Brian McFarlane as one of the 15 most meritorious British B films made between the Second World War and 1970, writing: "Above all, it is Peter Cushing's performance of the austere man, to whom efficiency matters most (though the film is subtle enough to allow him a certain integrity as well), and who will be frightened into a warmer sense of humanity, that lifts the film well above the perfunctory levels of much 'B' film-making."

In Offbeat: British Cinema's Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Items, Julian Upton wrote: "Cash on Demand is not just vastly superior to the majority of its British B-movie peers, it is also a cut above most of Hammer's output, both horror and non-horror."