| The Breaking Point | |
| Director: | Lance Comfort |
| Producer: | Peter Lambert |
| Music: | Albert Elms |
| Editing: | Peter Pitt |
| Studio: | Butcher's Film Service |
| Distributor: | Butcher's Film Service |
| Runtime: | 59 minutes |
| Country: | England |
| Language: | English |
The Breaking Point (also known as The Great Armored Car Swindle) is a 1961 second feature[1] British crime film directed by Lance Comfort and starring Peter Reynolds, Dermot Walsh, Joanna Dunham and Lisa Gastoni.[2]
Eric Winlatter works at a curency printing company. When the company wins a contract to print banknotes for the Middle East state of Lavadore, he is persuaded to help revolutionaries hi-jack the currency shipment. Cherry, his neglected wife, becomes suspicious and tells journalist Robert Wade. Eric is killed when he falls out of the villains' escape plane.
Kine Weekly said "Taut crime melodrama, unfolded against a convincing London backdrop."[3]
Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "A waste of one of Laurence Meynell's better novels, this trimmed to the bone thriller has little to offer apart from a well-staged gambling party sequence, a speedy climax and some desultory rough-and-tumble."[4]
The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 1/5 stars, writing: "If stars were awarded for plot contrivance, this low-budget thriller would be well into double figures. There's a banknote printer with a gambling debt, revolutionaries with a counterfeiting plan, an armed robbery, a bomb, a touch of adultery and a speeding plane finale. Not one character rings true nor is one fragment of the storyline credible."[5]