cult film freak: CAROL WHITE, DAVID GREGORY & PETER REYNOLDS IN 'GAOLBREAK'

Carol White in GAOLBREAK AKA JAILBREAK Year: 1962 Rating: **1/2

In the Swinging-Sixties, full-lipped blonde starlets were the thing in British cinema, from Julie Christie to Susannah York to Judy Geeson... but it started with Carol White, who appeared way back into the early-1960's, from a small part in BEAT GIRL to a co-starring turn in one of many Butcher's Film Group B&W crime-programmers, GAOLBREAK...

She's the girlfriend of the only kind-hearted member of a Ma Barker-style family of crooks led by oldest brother (and crime flick regular) Peter Reynolds, who conspires with surreptitiously resilient mother Avice Landone to knockoff a building with the contents of art auction proceeds... but there's a problem...

David Gregory in GAOLBREAK AKA JAILBREAK

Younger brothers David Kernan... Carol White's aforementioned smitten boyfriend... and the more precocious David Gregory... who played background to foreground young punks in British New Wave vehicles ranging from THE HI-JACKERS to THESE ARE THE DAMNED... are locked up and need to be sprung for the heist to continue...

Unfortunately the extreme low-budget, making other b-crimers like JUNGLE STREET and THE BREAK so wonderfully and sparsely noir-like, is a detriment here... as is the TV-movie-style hour-long length...

David Gregory in GAOLBREAK with David Kernan

The best scenes occur inside a local dance hall hangout (that happens to be right next door to the prison walls), featuring cute young locals Laurie Leigh and Angela Ramsden, providing more potential for a den-of-thieves melodrama than the actual escape is rushed and not very suspenseful...

And the central heist includes the blackmailing of a crooked doctor helping the brothers escape, while lovely Carol White (with an awful pre-beehive hairdo) sulks and screams about the overall crime-genre dilemma that needed more danger and urgency to matter.