Cash on Demand (Hammer Films, Woodpecker Productions, British Lion, Columbia, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Eventually my husband Charles returned from work last night (Saturday, December 13) an hour earlier than expected and therefore he got to watch with me the Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” screening of a really quirky 1961 crime thriller from Hammer Films, Cash on Demand. Directed by Quentin Lawrence from a script by David T. Chantler and Lewis Greifer from a play by Jacques Gillies, Cash on Demand came about after one of Hammer’s biggest stars, Peter Cushing, served notice on the studio that he was tired of rehashing Universal’s big monster properties and wanted something else. Cushing and André Morell, a key supporting player in this one, had already done an adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959 (Cushing thus became the first actor to play Holmes on screen since Basil Rathbone hung up the deerstalker after his last Holmes film, Dressed to Kill, 13 years earlier). For this one Cushing was cast as Harry Fordyce, imperious manager of the bank in Haversham, Buckinghamshire, southern England, and Morell as Col. Gore Hepburn, who shows up claiming to be an examiner for an insurance company but is really a crook determined to rob the Haversham Bank of 90,000 pounds without doing anything as crude as sticking up the place or blowing out its safes. Gore Hepburn puts Fordyce and his clerk, Pearson (Richard Vernon), through the wringer on this one, winning Fordyce’s cooperation by telling him his gang are in his home and have wired electrodes around his wife to immobilize her forever if he gets out of line. Gore Hepburn gets Pearson to take his suitcases out of his car (an Aston-Martin, whose poshness becomes a major running gag in the story), though there’s a glitch in the plan when he finds that Pearson doesn’t drive (like me!) and therefore someone else will have to move the car from the 20-minute zone it’s parked in to the bank’s own lot.

All this takes place on Christmas Eve and a snowstorm suddenly starts (“Cue the corn flakes!” I joked; ground-up and white-painted corn flakes were a common movie substitute for snow in the early days) and inconveniences the bell-ringing Santa Claus impersonator who’s doing his thing just outside the bank. Pearson and a younger bank staff member have already called the insurance company – the real one – and learned that the real “Gore Hepburn” is an impostor. Fordyce pleads with them to cancel the call to the police in fear for his family, but the cops show up anyway, recognize Gore Hepburn as a well-known crook, and arrest him. It turns out that Fordyce’s wife and child (whom we never see, though we briefly hear their voices on the soundtrack and they’re visibly present through framed photos on Fordyce’s desk) were in no danger after all. Gore Hepburn hired a voice impersonator to record “their” voices on tape and play it over the phone to Fordyce to fool him. For a while I thought where this was going was that the cops would arrest Fordyce as Gore Hepburn’s “inside man” and he’d be unable to convince them that he was only helping rob his own bank under duress, but in the end they’re convinced by his story and the experience leads Fordyce to conclude that he’s been way too much of a martinet boss and he should be more collegial and forgiving towards his staff. This film is a particular favorite of Eddie Muller’s, who regards it as a modern-day reworking of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with Fordyce as Scrooge and Gore Hepburn as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Both Charles and I found the parallel too forced to be believable, but Muller has taken a major role in rehabilitating this film’s reputation, including raising money for a full restoration. Like a lot of other Hammers, the film lost a considerable amount of running time (it got 22 minutes shorter) between its British release in 1961 and its U.S. debut a year later. Charles was also surprised it was in black-and-white instead of Hammer’s usual Gorycolor, and I couldn’t help but think when Gore Hepburn mentioned having connected Mrs. Fordyce to “electrodes” that Peter Cushing was probably thinking, “Oh, here we go again.” (Actually, in The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer’s first Frankenstein film, Peter Cushing created his Monster in a giant aquarium – a prop that was reused for The Rocky Horror Picture Show – instead of electrodes connected to lightning rods or kites the way Colin Clive had in James Whale’s Frankenstein films.) Cash on Demand is a quirky little thriller, not at all film noir but a nice little exercise in suspense that probably gave Peter Cushing the change of pace he was hoping for and was a nice little audience-pleaser.