Cash on Demand

I wrote once, many years ago, I think when I was blogging about Village of the Damned, that having a good script can make up for having to make a movie on a shoestring budget. Another movie that illustrates this is Cash on Demand.

Peter Cushing plays Harry Fordyce, a martinet of a bank manager in Haversham, a small town a couple hours' drive north of London. It's near Christmas, but Fordyce doesn't feel like letting his employees celebrate, indeed berating his assistant Pearson (Richard Vernon) for "borrowing" £10 to make the books come out right, even though the money was returned. Fordyce could have Pearson fired and unable to find another job in the banking sector.

Into the bank comes Col. Gore Hepburn (André Morell). He shows Pearson and Fordyce his private business card, informing them that he's from the bank's insurance company, and is there on a surprise audit to check the bank's security measures; after all, you don't want to give people advance knowledge of this so that they can fix the problems and make the place look like a Potemkin village.

Fordyce invites Hepburn into his private office to discuss the audit, when his phone rings. It's a call from his very anxious wife, begging him to do what the men want, with an even more anxious son being heard in the background. Obviously, Fordyce doesn't quite understand at first, but it's fairly quickly made clear that Hepburn is there to rob the bank, and a couple of accomplices have Mrs. Fordyce and the son held hostage, ready to kill them if Harry doesn't follow orders.

Hepburn has been investigating this particular branch's operations for a year, and knows that they should have a good £90,000 in the vault. Of course, there are all sorts of security measures to make certain that money doesn't leave the vault in an illicit manner, such as multiple keys held by multiple members. Hepburn wants to inform as few people about the robbery as possible, since that will lead to one of them screwing up the carefully planned scheme and calling the police, possibly necessitating the killing of Mrs. Fordyce.

For Fordyce, the shoe is now on the other foot as he's got the highly intelligent Hepburn ordering him around, Fordyce being afraid to do anything the least bit wrong lest the family gets killed. After all, he's been such a taskmaster to all his employees that he doesn't really have any friends, just his family. Hepburn has figured this out and uses it to his advantage. As part of the getaway, Hepburn is going to have his accomplices take the wife and kid with them for an hour.

But even though the robbery itself goes mostly to plan, and well enough for Hepburn if not for Fordyce, problems begin to develop not long after Hepburn leaves. A call had been put into the insurance company in London about the sending of the auditor, and it's ony after Hepburn left (this was the days when getting a long-distance line was a bit more difficult) that the truth is discovered by everybody other than Fordyce, and Pearson has called in the police. From the point of view of everybody else in the bank, as well as the police, it's certainly possible that Fordyce could have been in on it as part of an inside job.

Cash on Demand was apparently based on a stage play, which is part of why there are so few sets and the movie could be made on a fairly limited budget. But the movie is quite good for a little programmer, thanks to the performances from Cushing and Morell. The tension really is palpable, and figuring out how the robbery is going to play out really is a mystery. Unfortunately, the ending is rushed and a bit implausible, but thankfully that's only the last several minutes.

Peter Cushing is understandably known for his horror roles, but he was really a more versatile actor than that, as Cash on Demand shows. It's one of those little movies that really deserves to be better known.