GB
1959
2hrs 7mins
Dir: James Hill
Starring: Howard Greene and Peter Copley
Two young cousins help stop a criminal gang who are searching an abandoned mine for a mysterious commodity
This Children’s Film Foundation production was initially a cinema serial released in eight instalments entitled ‘Secret Agent’, ‘Danger in the Dark’, ‘Trapped Underground’, ‘Poison Gas’, ‘Sudden Peril’, ‘Hot on the Trail’, ‘Out of Control’ and ‘Desperate Finish’. The film was released seven years later in West Germany under the title Das Geheimnis der Mine (The Secret of the Mine), still in eight parts, but reduced in running time to 1hr 49mins. Oddly, this is the version I watched, wholly in English! The location of the mine used during the film for exterior shots was somewhere in West Cornwall, already a barren and windswept landscape by this stage. Several china clay pits also feature and it gives the industrial historian a good glimpse into Cornwall’s main industry. A chase sequence on foot briefly passes a railway siding containing four-wheeled vans, but this is the only glimpse of a standard gauge train in the film. However, as is so typical of such a landscape, a number of narrow-gauge railways can be seen at the china clay pit including a long abandoned rope worked incline. All these scenes appear in Part 5 of the film – ‘Sudden Peril’.
