The Siege of Sidney Street

Several weeks back, I mentioned having picked up this box set of British B movies and doing a post on one of the films. Over the weekend, I watched another, The Siege of Sidney Street.

The movie deals with a real-life incident, the January 1911 Sidney Street siege in which a group of Russian émigré anarchists had committed some robberies and then holed up in a house on Sidney Street to escape the police. The movie version uses a framing device of a woman (Nicole Berger) who knew the men.

It's an incident I have to admit that I, not being British, knew nothing about. The makes for an interesting idea for a movie, and one that I would probably be predisposed to like, which makes it all the more surprising that I had a lot of problems with it. To be fair to the moviemakers, however, the biggest problem is that the print is panned-and-scanned down to 4:3 from the original "Dyaliscope" (a wide-screen process I don't think I'd heard of) aspect ratio which IMDb claims is 2.35:1. It's extremely obvious as half the opening and closing credits are cut off! That and the camera is moving defensively, as the people in the old TCM letterboxing promo talk about. I guess this is what you get with a low budget box set.

But there were other problems with the movie. The actual siege only takes up the climax of the movie; much of it takes up the gang planning the robberies that led up to it, as well as the police investigation of those robberies. Those investigations are slow and drag the movie's pace way down at times. The whole think also felt overly complicated to me.

One interesting thing (that did happen in real life) is the presence near the end of a young Winston Churchill; he was the Home Secretary (if memory serves, at the time roughly equivalent to a state Attorney-General in the US) so in charge of the police. Churchill is played by the movie's screenplay writer, Jimmy Sangster, who also wrote a bunch of movies for Hammer.

The Siege of Sidney Street deserves a restoration in the proper aspect ratio; I just wish it were a better movie.