It’s back to 1954 for a rather interesting British crime movie called Forbidden Cargo. The plot surrounds the search for a gang of smugglers by Customs and Excise.

The movie starts out with a report from an ornithologist about what she believes are Royal Navy sailors unloading stores on a beach in Shoeburyness in Essex. She is complaining that the sailors are frightening rare sea birds.

Eventually a Customs man goes to check the complaint out and finds that what they have are not errant naval personnel but smugglers.

The Customs investigator tracks the smugglers across Europe which results in a fast paced, well as fast paced as 1950’s prop aircraft could manage, chase across the continent back to London.

I’ll not give too many spoilers but there’s some good action scenes set in the old Pool of London back when it was an actual working commercial port.

Those who like old vehicles will be interested in this movie as there’s an old Rolls Royce, some Police Wolseley’s along with some interesting commercial vehicles including an amphibious DUKW landing craft. Incidentally although part of the action is said to take place at Shoeburyness it may well be that some of this action may have been filmed instead at Camber Sands as I’m not sure that there are dunes like that at Shoeburyness and many dune or desert scenes were filmed at that time at Camber.

This is a nicely written crime thriller with some nice twists in the plot here and there.

I enjoyed this one and I hope you enjoy it too.