Tiger Bay (1959)
Cardiff has featured in disappointingly few feature films. We still await the classic film using the re-vamped Bay as location, but the city's docks area at least furnished the backdrop for intense action in the engrossing thriller Tiger Bay.
For some older Welsh filmgoers the film's appeal may stem mainly from the presence in key scenes of colourful landmarks long vanished and the docks and its working class community is brought vividly to life, thanks largely to Eric Cross' sharp black and white photography.
Tension builds steadily to the climax but the film's most astonishing feature is surely the performance of Hayley Mills in what may well be the finest juvenile debut ever in a British movie.
There is evidence also of clever casting with John Mills, Hayley's father, as the sympathetic but determined detective seeking to prise out incriminating details from the girl, Gillie. She's a witness to a violent killing, desperately trying to protect the culprit (played by German actor Horst Buchholz - the gauche, wildly impetuous young recruit of The Magnificent Seven the following year).
Hayley Mills as this lively tomboy is wonderfully expressive. She's mischievous, mercurial and obdurate by turns - and a nightmare for any cop to interview. She switches from a tormentor of childish glee (as she taunts the boys in her gang or Kenneth Griffith's long suffering organist) to sullen obduracy, her scrunched-up face a picture.
Producer Julian Wintle was inspired to make Tiger Bay after the success of his feature The One That Got Away in Germany in 1957, starring Hardy Kruger. This inspired him to cast Buchholz but director J Lee Thompson, a Bristolian, deserves credit for not merely casting Hayley, almost by chance after a visit to John Mills' home, but also surrounding her with a posse of actors to whom humane, warm roles are second nature and they undoubtedly helped the youngster's debut.
Megs Jenkins plays a fretting loving mam in the style we used to expect from Rachel Thomas (we might forget that Jenkins seemed, at least, a little more sinister in a role as a Welsh character in Green for Danger). Meredith Edwards affects a crusty exterior as a policeman and long suffering victim of Hayley's pranks, but underneath he's a comforting presence.
Yvonne Mitchell plays the hardboiled, feckless victim in a scene shot with some craft to retain suspense and ambivalence.
The gentle, unlikely rapport forged between Buchholz playing an impetuous, sensitive man on the run (he's less volatile here than in the John Sturges Western) and the girl who shelters him is one of the film's more endearing features, especially in scenes when Thompson opens out the movie to embrace other notable landscape features around the river Usk at Newport and Taffs Well.
