Tony Keith This early attempt to depict London as a swinging place is a far cry from what you may expect in a British crime film.Instead of fog and rain we have our hero driving around in the sunshine in an open convertible.The characters are all obvious stereotypes and dress the part. The Scotland Yard cops use terms like "beat it!" and "hoosegow" which I doubt were in the original book.The plot is a mishmash of seemingly unrelated, and quite uninteresting criminal activity, perpetrated by uninteresting one dimensional characters and one waits for the film to really get started.Our hero, Jack Hawkins is a fine actor, but is wasted in this piece of Anglo-American fluff.

ianlouisiana There really were policemen like George Gideon and I would be very surprised if the late John Creasey didn't know several of them.He was one of England's most prolific crime writers using a plethora of noms de plume including J.J Marric.under which he wrote the "Gideon" novels which were quite highly regarded in their day. If you married a cop in the 1940s and 50s you knew what you were getting into.Pre war ideas of dedication and service hadn't quite been extinguished and flickered on in professions like policework,nursing and General Practice medicine. With no Political Correctness to worry about,no "targets" to meet,no budgets to constrain them,detectives were able to set about solving crimes in a relatively uninhibited manner and were rather good at it.George Gideon was no exception.His conduct might seem unacceptable half a century on both at work and at home but in his world it was unexceptionable. Mr Jack Hawkins makes him human rather than superhuman ,capable of an ill - judged action but overall on the side of the angels. The "Day" in the title is certainly overflowing with incident.Robbery and murder seem to be the norm even in the days of "Preventive Detention",the birch and Capital Punishment. This is an absorbing British procedural with first - rate performances. Despite some persuasive arguments elsewhere on the site I don't believe it bears the hallmarks of Mr Ford's best movies,but I suspect he had fun making it.And maybe - like a lot of Americans at the time -he ended up believing our unarmed, underpaid policemen were wonderful.

whitesheik I knew I could come here and find someone proclaiming this as one of Ford's best 50s films, and I was right. Not only one of his best 50s films, but better than The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. Uh - no. Maybe Ford's worst, if not, right up there. The people praising the pace must have only seen the US black-and-white version, because the two-hour color version from the UK is excruciating. One uninteresting vignette after another. Yes, good actors, and an active score by Douglas Gamley, but it's just really, really bad.They insist I write more - why is that? I just said all I had to say, but they say it wasn't long enough, but this must be a new rule or something because in this very thread there is a "review" exactly two lines long. So, let me add one final thought - this film is not good.

cyclonev The novel 'Gideon's Day' was the first in the Gideon series by John Creasey (written under the pseudonym of J J Marric) and was published in 1955. Each book in the series followed 'G G' (George Gideon) through a period of time. Cases that came up during that time were not necessarily solved by the end of the novel: they were kind of a "slice of life" of (Creasey's image of) 50s Scotland Yard.There are 21 novels in the Gideon series, as written by John Creasey, with the last one published in 1976 (2 years after his death). I did, however, once came across another Gideon novel, written after Creasey's death by another author using the name J J Marric. If you like the Gideon TV series and movie and are interested in the books, make SURE they are by Creasey as anything else is a very poor substitute.