Tiger Bay is the colourful and unusual name of the large bay harbour of the Welsh port of Cardiff, where this story is entirely set in the 1950s. This is the film which introduced the twelve year-old Hayley Mills to the screen. It made a huge impact at that time and has remained famous ever since, not least because it is a powerful and intense psychological thriller, with a friendship between a young girl and a grown man who has unwittingly committed a murder at its heart. From the very first instant that we see Hayley Mills staring through an iron grill in the street where she lives, with her huge expressive eyes and her sandy lashes, something happens to us. We realize that this is not an ordinary child actress we are seeing, but an apparition. No one can ever understand those ineffable personal qualities which combine to produce a human presence on screen which force everyone to watch, so that we cannot take our eyes away for a second. Hayley Mills's qualities go way beyond mere charm and have nothing to do with being cute. She embodies something, one cannot say what, but certainly it includes freshness and spontaneity and a complete lack of self-consciousness or vanity. She is heedless of how she looks, and if she furrows her brow or scrunches up her face (two of her endearing mannerisms) she does not care a jot about what this might possibly look like. As a child actress, she was the diametrical opposite of Shirley Temple, whose mother was always fussing over her before each take and just before the director would say 'Action!' she would harass her child by shouting: 'Sparkle, Shirley, sparkle!' Miss Mills's father John Mills on the other hand was very laid back and did not require any vicarious satisfaction through his child. The story is very famous in cinema history that the director J. Lee Thompson dropped by John Mills's house for lunch in the London suburb of Richmond, plagued with his problem of casting the lead child in his next film. Mills's younger daughter was playing in the back garden and lolloping around in a rather tomboyish way when she unexpectedly caught Thompson's eye and he became riveted by her rather unusual personality, which might be described as 'somewhat quirky'. In a TV portrait of him late in life, John Mills was asked by the interviewer about this incident, and he frankly described his younger daughter at that time as 'a funny little thing', and said no one had ever imagined her becoming a child actress. But it was just those indefinable qualities of being unlike other people despite looking normal that made Hayley Mills perfect for this part, and it made cinema history. She is called Hayley after an ancestor, the English writer and poet William Hayley (1745-1820), a friend of William Blake and William Cowper, author of numerous volumes and patron of the painter George Romney and others. Before her, no one ever had the first name of Hayley, and all the thousands of girls named Hayley in the world today are named after her whether they realize it or not. The film actress Hayley Atwell (born 1982), for instance, enjoys telling people that she is named after Hayley Mills. It is impossible to overestimate the cultural and social influence which Hayley Mills exerted in her career simply by existing. When this film was released, it was spotted by Walt Disney, who signed her up to play the lead in one of his most influential films, POLYANNA. Miss Mills's earnest and heedless cheerfulness, her insouciant optimism and irresistible smile, made her an instant international icon of hope that everything might really turn out all right in a difficult world. It was after this that the more cynical and world-weary of the chatterati began to refer to her as 'Little Miss Sweetness and Light', because all that shining goodness in her face was simply too much for them. And she went on and on, in film after film, radiating goodness and good cheer and inspiring hundreds of millions of people all over the world, not least the entire population of Middle America, that vast space between the two coasts inhabited by ordinary people whom the trendies of the media so utterly despise because they have such unfashionable traits as values and morals. To them, Hayley Mills might as well have been an angel come down from heaven to bring them joy, but what made this work was that she herself was entirely oblivious of the effect she was having on a large proportion of the population of the entire world, and she imagined that she was quite ordinary. Such lack of ego was, of course, the essential ingredient. She was born a good person, and in some respects the secret of her appeal is as simple as that. And, unlike Shirley Temple, Hayley Mills did not have to be told to 'sparkle', for she radiated all that sweetness and light with all the naturalness of a frolicking lamb which leaps in the sun just because it is a fine day and the grass is green. I daresay that no film actress has ever had a greater impact upon the world than Hayley Mills, not even the sultry and mysterious Greta Garbo. She became the world's tonic. You might be depressed, but if you went to see a Hayley Mills film, you would emerge convinced that everything might really turn out all right after all. And yet the character of Gillie Evans which she plays in TIGER BAY is that of a disturbed girl who is a compulsive liar, and she is not sweet at all. The German actor Horst Buchholz plays the Polish sailor with whom she becomes entangled. He learned to speak Polish for the part. The film is extremely intense and is a true classic of its time.

Like a lot of people, I suppose, I was familiar with young Hayley Mills through her Disney films of the early to mid-60s. It's somewhat of a shame that she was shuffled into less challenging child-oriented fare when she offered such a fascinating performance in this, her very first film. I was pleased to find a copy of it, especially being that the vast majority of her early non-Disney pictures are quite rare if not forgotten altogether.Although it was Mills that brought "Tiger Bay" to my attention, it has much more to offer than that. J Lee Thompson, whose greatest and most known achievement was "Cape Fear", handles the direction of this film with a kind of grace and style uncommon to 1959. There are things that place it squarely in the period - the soundtrack, for one - but it has a very free, alive feeling that overcomes convention. There is a lot of on-location shooting, and the black & white cinematography is both realistic and very engaging.The other actors are all good, though somewhat on the over-the-top side at times. I liked Horst Buchholz (who I'd seen before, but never noticed). He plays the role of the spurned lover quite well, but the character goes from being angry and violent to downright likable far too quickly to be completely convincing. John Mills (Hayley Mills' father) plays the serious detective-type quite well, very intense.I really enjoyed "Tiger Bay" it has enough energy and pace to keep you engaged. It never drags or gets lost on its way to conclusion. For a film of its kind from the period in which it was produced, this is one of the best I've seen. This is a great little thriller.

Tiger Bay was a great movie for a number of reasons. I will admit the kid and the killer plot is very familiar territory, and while the film offers very little new it is still a remarkable and I think underrated movie. The best element was the truly terrific debut performance of Hayley Mills. Quite frankly, her performance is one of the greatest child performances ever, that's how good it was. The plot about a young girl befriending a murderous sailor and her attempts to hinder the detective's investigation is still suspenseful and clever, and still manages to be intriguing in the slower moments. The cinematography is fabulous, and perfectly captures the sights of the Cardiff docklands and of Hayley's photogenic face. Also J Lee Thompson is a fine director of children, and directs Hayley with care and precision. Even more remarkable is the credible characters and the supporting acting of Hayley's father the wonderful John Mills and Horst Buchholz. All in all, a very good movie. 9/10 Bethany Cox

"Tiger Bay" is one of the best British films of the late fifties, and can be classified as forming part of the "kitchen sink" social-realist movement which was a noted feature of the British cinema during those years, although it perhaps has less in the way of social comment than some other films of that type, concentrating more on thriller elements. It was made by the talented director J. Lee Thompson, who was responsible for another great film from the previous year, "Ice Cold in Alex". Like many of the best British movies, this one has a strong sense of place. Tiger Bay is a working-class area of Cardiff around the city's docks, noted for its multi-racial and multi-cultural character long before multi-racialism and multi-culturalism became buzzwords of political correctness. Many of its inhabitants were foreign seamen, and the area also became notorious for a high level of unsolved crimes, committed by men who disappeared back to sea before the police had a chance to arrest them.It is one of these seamen who is at the heart of the film. Bronislaw Korczynski is a young Polish sailor who returns from a voyage to find that his girlfriend, Anya, has left him for another man; a violent quarrel ends with him shooting her dead. Unknown to him, the crime has been witnessed by a twelve-year-old girl, Gillie, who was watching the scene through the letterbox. (For some reason, the name "Gillie" is always pronounced with a hard "g"). Like Korczynski, Gillie is an outsider in Tiger Bay; she is originally from London and lives with her aunt. (She is possibly an orphan, although this is never made clear). She finds Korczynski's gun, which he has hidden after the killing, and takes it, hoping that it will win her more acceptance among the local children, who have excluded her from their games of cowboys-and-Indians on the grounds that she does not possess a toy gun of her own. Korczynski goes on the run from the police, hoping that he can sign on a foreign ship and be out of the country before they can arrest him for the murder. Realising that Gillie can identify him, he kidnaps her to prevent her from talking to the authorities, and a strange friendship grows up between them. This friendship can be seen as a result of either Gillie's first romantic love or the desire of a fatherless girl for a father-figure in her life (even though Korczynski is hardly old enough to be her biological father). This was Hayley Mills' first film and her performance is absolutely captivating. It made her an instant star, and led to her being signed up by Disney. She did, however, have time to make one more great British film, "Whistle Down the Wind", which has certain parallels with "Tiger Bay". In both films Hayley plays a young girl who befriends a criminal on the run, and both strongly evoke a spirit of place. (The later film is set in the rural hinterland of a Lancashire mill town). In both films the principal male character is a murderer, and yet not entirely unsympathetic. Alan Bates' Arthur Blakey in "Whistle…." is a rough, taciturn man, but there is something about his demeanour that suggests he could have been better under different circumstances.Horst Buchholz's Korczynski is perhaps even more sympathetic than Blakey. Indeed, the film seems designed to arouse our sympathy for him. He is young, good-looking, hard-working and friendly (one of our first sights in the film is of him stopping to play with a group of children). He is in exile from his homeland, at this period under an oppressive Communist regime. He seems to be desperately in love with Anya, even though she (to judge from the little we see of her) hardly seems to deserve him, and his crime was committed in a moment of passion. This is one crime film where the audience will all be rooting for the criminal to get away. It would have been impossible for any adult star to avoid being upstaged by the irrepressible Hayley, but Buchholz comes close to holding his own with her. There is also a good performance from Hayley's father, John, as the policeman leading the investigation."Whistle Down the Wind", in which the children mistake Blakey for Jesus Christ returned to earth, is a deeply religious allegory of the Christian faith (which makes it something of a rarity in cinema history). "Tiger Bay" also has religious overtones, underlined by the fact that Gillie is a chorister at her local church, although they are less marked, and there is no consistent allegorical pattern. The film's climax comes when the police board the Venezuelan ship on which Korczynski has signed on. Because, however, the ship is outside Britain's three-mile territorial limit, they have no legal power to arrest him, and the ship's captain refuses to allow him to be removed. Gillie has been brought on board by the police, who hope that she will identify Korczynski, but she refuses to betray her friend, and attempts to run away. In doing so, she slips and falls overboard. Without hesitating, Korczynski, who is a strong swimmer, dives into the sea to save her, even though he knows that this will lead to his arrest for Anya's murder and possibly to his execution. (Britain still had the death penalty in 1959). This scene brought to my mind the words from St John's Gospel "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends". 9/10