The Brits produced quite a number of gritty, violent, underworld noirs in the early 1960’s (see Hell is a City, 1960; Never Let Go, 1960), and Ken Annakin’s The Informers (US: Underworld Informers) is one of the best. A brutal exploration of the world of “snouts” (anonymous police informers), the film stars Nigel Patrick as Johnnoe, the police inspector who continues using criminal informers even though it’s forbidden by the department. When one of his snouts, Jim Ruskin (John Cowley), is found out by the gang co-led by Bertie Hoyle (Derrin Nesbitt) and Leon Sale (Frank Finlay), and ends up tortured and killed, Johnnoe again disobeys orders and conducts his own investigation, but this time he’s framed for accepting bribes and kicked off the force. With nothing left to lose, Johnnoe descends to the underground depths and ends up fighting for his life. Margaret Whiting is excellent as Maisie, Bertie’s abused and frequently pathetic girlfriend (“If I haven’t got you, I might as well be dead”), who agrees to play a hooker for the frame-up, and Colin Blakely plays Charlie Ruskin, the dead man’s brother who is hell bent on revenge. Providing an unsparing look at the harshness and violence of the criminal underbelly, the film is dynamic and fluid, the camera seemingly floating from room to room, scene to scene, many of the settings almost Dickensian in their dirtiness. The cruelty is both psychological (lying about kidnapping a child to get his mother to disclose information) and physical (the climactic sequence involves stabbings, shootings, fatal falls, and a riot using wrenches as weapons).