Cinema Essentials

In Hell is a City , Stanley Baker plays Inspector Martineau, a detective with the City of Manchester police. Martineau was responsible for putting a notorious criminal, Don Starling (John Crawford), behind bars. As a result, when Starling was imprisoned he swore revenge on Martineau. When news comes that Starling has broken out of jail, Martineau is convinced that he's hiding somewhere in the city and wants to drop everything to bring him in. But first Martineau has to deal with a robbery from a bookmakers run by Gus Hawkins (Donald Pleasence). The robbery led to the loss of £4,000 and the accidental death of a young woman, one of Hawkins's employees. As Martineau investigates the crime, he comes to suspect that Don Starling may in fact be responsible. Luckily, the cash from the bookmakers was stained with green dye, something that helps the police to gradually home in on the criminals. One by one, Martineau starts to track down Starling's accomplices, bending the rules a

If I asked you to name the biggest film at the US box office in 1977, you might well guess (correctly) that it was Star Wars . But if I asked you to name the second biggest, you might struggle a little. Was it Close Encounters of the Third Kind ... or maybe the James Bond epic The Spy Who Loved Me ? Nope. It was a cross-country car chase comedy called Smokey and the Bandit , a film as divorced from the era of modern blockbuster cinema as its box office rival Star Wars is inextricably linked to it.