The Wrong Arm of the Law

Director: Cliff Owen
Cast: Peter Sellers, Lionel Jeffries, Bernard Cribbins, Nanette Newman
Genre: Crime/Comedy 1962
Running time: 94 mins.
Rating:★

Peter Sellers stars as Pearly Gates, the cockney kingpin of London's most efficient gang of thieves, organizing spectacular robberies from behind the front of the haute-couture dress salon. Everything goes well until the police start appearing after ever job to confiscate the loot. The astute Pearly realizes there's a traitor in his gang, an no one is above suspicion, not even his enticing girlfriend Valerie (Nanette Newman).

The "clever" who can out smart whom isn't so clever, especially when the dialogue and plot are utterly predictable. This film seems better suited as a Saturday morning kids' show! Which is ashame because Peter Sellers stars in it and is hardly worthy of his comedic talents. He's surrounded with "actors," whose performances are so root-canalingly painful that one believes that the casting director ran out of time, from the pressure of getting the picture done, and enticed common folk with the question of "How would like to become an actor?"

What brings the film down even more, making it an obvious low-budget landfill, is the sixties sitcom cinematography with severely high contrast and unpolished compositions.