West 11 (1963)

• Year: 1963
• Released: 29 Sep 1966
• Country: United Kingdom
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057677/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/west_11
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: English
• Genre: Crime, Drama
• Runtime: 93 min
• Writer: Keith Waterhouse, Willis Hall, Laura del Rivo
• Director: Michael Winner
• Cast: Alfred Lynch, Kathleen Breck, Eric Portman
• Keywords: murder, london, england, swinging 60s,

6.5/10

West 11 Storyline

This Michael Winner directed film looks into life at Notting Hill, London, then a seedy slum. A down on his luck Joe Beckett (Alfred Lynch) is recruited into crime by Richard Dyce (Eric Portman).

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West 11 Movie Reviews

Middling kitchen sinker

WEST 11 is an early film in the career of Michael Winner and it has an atmosphere of the general seediness that seemed to infuse all of his pictures; an early ’60s Notting Hill is the most interesting past of this. Alfred Lynch plays a down-on-his-luck youth who gets caught up in the sinister schemes of Eric Portman, but rather than focusing on the crime aspects of the storyline this is more of a kitchen sink/angry young man drama with personal relationships bearing the brunt of the attention. A good supporting cast enlivens it somewhere, but I found it strictly middling.

Rather strange

With writers who were at the heart of the British new wave and set in a run down Notting Gill,as it was,I was expecting a touch of social realism.However what we get is a film that after much coveting of an X certificate,tends to go into lurid melodrama in the last third.However it was good to see Kathleen Harrison and Frieda Jackson,Finlay Currie and of course Diana Dors.A cast to cherish even if the film is not

Smoothly made little Brit-pic

A minor but very smoothly made example of British film noir. Director Michael Winner, then at the start of his career, had a strong cast (Alfred Lynch, Eric Portman, Diana Dors, Finlay Currie, et al) to inhabit this starkly photographed little crime melodrama set in London bedsit-land, all tacky Notting Hill coffee bars and smoky jazz clubs.

Lynch makes a downbeat but sympathetic protagonist, more thoughtful than the usual type of hero. Portman plays the clipped-moustache ex-military man-turned-swindler to perfection. Dors is just right, too, as a blousy divorcée (“Young enough to still want a husband; old enough not get the one I want”).

Winner plays up the salacious sex element a bit, but a tight Keith Waterhouse/Willis Hall script touches on Lynch’s Catholic guilt, and Currie’s existential search for ‘truth’, just enough to give the story a modicum of depth. There’s also an evocative score by Stanley Black, with Acker Bilk on sax.

Until latterly a neglected, even scorned, cinema sub-genre, these usually low-budget British film noirs, often superbly photographed, were violent by the standards of their day, and showed the rain-washed streets of cities like Newcastle (Payroll), Manchester (Hell Is a City) and Brighton (Jigsaw), as well as London, could be pretty mean, too.

Winner’s next film, The System with Oliver Reed, was even better.