ianlouisiana Review of The Slasher

The Slasher (1953)

Hangin's too good for 'em if you ask me...........................

[6/10 · 31 August 2009]

It's easy to laugh at this rather smugly here in the 21st century when it's so safe to walk the streets and drunken yobs don't blight our town centres every weekend and our youths are not indiscriminately killing each other,and we can leave our doors open all night and hug a hoodie...yeah,right. Like the infinitely better "The Blue Lamp","Cosh Boy" is an Issue Picture.There the resemblance ends.Whilst the former was a noir masterpiece,one of the most seminal of all 50s British pictures,the latter is a catchpenny bandwagon-jumping appallingly made load of tosh made to cash in a genuine fear of "Teddy Boys","Cosh Boys" and the like that held the post-war public in its sway. Because the fact that the movie is awful should not be a reason to dismiss the fears of the audience who went to see it.My father who'd fought the Italians and Germans in the African desert was a firm believer in corporal and capital punishment,as were many of his generation.No amount of sophistry will deny the fact that now our country is a far more dangerous place than in 1953 when he could happily walk the dog to the newsagents with a better than average chance of getting home unscathed. The movie "Cosh Boy",terrible as it was,brought the issue of violent youth out into the open,much the same as "Cathy come home" did for the disenfranchised 15 years later and the masterly "Scum" raised the profile of the treatment of young offenders. All these movies caught the public's attention and - ultimately - Parliament's. At a time when the Authorities were more prepared to deal robustly with bad behaviour,exemplary sentencing paved the way for the decline of the feral youths of the day.It may have all been appallingly judgemental but it worked. So..."Cosh Boy" is a lousy movie with dreadful acting and all put together for what it would cost nowadays for a haircut at Trumpers...... but it served a purpose.Lewis Gilbert may well have intended to make a piece of sensationalist dross,pure and simple,but he ended up with a movie that changed things for the better for ordinary working-class Brits.Our present bunch of Arts Council subsidised Armchair Socialists would do well to note that.According to his diaries,Kenneth Williams auditioned for a part in this movie.Tragically he didn't get it - he might have lifted it to a whole new level.