Never Let Go

“You’re not meant to push and shove your way through life,” says Anne Cummings (Elizabeth Sellars) to her under-accomplished husband John (Richard Todd) while contrasting him to more successful, aggressive men in John Guillermin’s Never Let Go. Having a rough week, in which he’s been replaced by a younger man at work and had his new car stolen, John has been trying unsuccessfully to toughen up and fight back yet we can tell he’s a kind, quixotic man at his core (Todd’s performance demonstrates this conflict brilliantly). Investing his whole self in the project of retrieving his car, John learns that it was taken by a young punk named Tommy Towers (Adam Faith) who’s working for vicious sociopath Lionel Meadows (Peter Sellers), a garage owner running an elaborate auto theft scheme. Convinced his car is in Meadows’ possession, John clashes with police inspector Thomas (Noel Willman) and gets himself brutally pummeled more than once by Meadows and his flankers. Guillermin evokes a gritty desperation in all the characters, such as dim-witted, depressed newspaper salesman Alfie (Mervyn Johns), who exists alone in a trashy, dilapidated apartment, and Jackie (Carol White), the teen-aged runaway whose role alternates between Meadows’s mistress and Tommy’s girl. John Barry’s moody score blends piano, brass, and bass with dramatic percussion sequences, and the climactic fight in the garage has the physicality of a superhero film.