The Breaking Point (1961 film)

The Breaking Point (also known as The Great Armored Car Swindle) is a 1961 second feature British crime film directed by Lance Comfort and starring Peter Reynolds, Dermot Walsh, Joanna Dunham and Lisa Gastoni.

Plot
Eric Winlatter works at a curency printing company. When the company wins a contract to print banknotes for the Middle East state of Lavadore, he is persuaded to help revolutionaries hi-jack the currency shipment. Cherry, his neglected wife, becomes suspicious and tells journalist Robert Wade. Eric is killed when he falls out of the villains' escape plane.

Cast

 * Peter Reynolds as Eric Winlatter
 * Dermot Walsh as Robert Wade
 * Joanna Dunham as Cherry Winlatter
 * Lisa Gastoni as Eva
 * Jack Allen as Ernest Winlatter
 * Brian Cobby as Peter de Savory
 * Arnold Diamond as Telling
 * Eric Corrie as Wilson
 * Desmond Cullum-Jones as Evans
 * Geoffrey Denton as debt collector
 * Richard Golding as Mintos
 * John G. Heller as Mel
 * Gertan Klauber as Lofty
 * John Lawrence as security officer
 * Mercia Mansfield as Ernest's secretary
 * Charles Russell as Cappel

Critical reception
Kine Weekly said "Taut crime melodrama, unfolded against a convincing London backdrop."

Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "A waste of one of Laurence Meynell's better novels, this trimmed to the bone thriller has little to offer apart from a well-staged gambling party sequence, a speedy climax and some desultory rough-and-tumble."

The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 1/5 stars, writing: "If stars were awarded for plot contrivance, this low-budget thriller would be well into double figures. There's a banknote printer with a gambling debt, revolutionaries with a counterfeiting plan, an armed robbery, a bomb, a touch of adultery and a speeding plane finale. Not one character rings true nor is one fragment of the storyline credible."