This is an entertaining thriller despite its dated-ness. The efforts to rescue a trapped boy make for edge-of-your-seat drama. The story covers every angle from frazzled nerves as time expires to anguished self-recriminations when there is nothing for some of the characters to do but wait. All of this is predictable yet compelling. Mr. Dawson, the vault expert, reminds me of Mr. Wolf in "Pulp Fiction" in that he's the guy who finally comes in and lays out what they have to do to solve the problem and rescue the boy. He has a straight forward but labor intensive plan and directs everybody to get it done.
As a bonus, we get to see Sean Connery in a pre-fame bit part. He is cast as Welder #1 (although his boss calls him "Bill" at one point) and is the only character who has a British Isles accent, even though he is not the only cast member who seems to be British. Indeed, the production is interesting in that while this movie seems to have been made in the UK, it is based on a television play that was originally done on Canadian TV. The cast is international in that it includes British, Irish, Canadian and American actors. (It is a sad note that Irish actor Victor Wood, who plays Mr. Zeeder, died less than a year after this movie's release.)
The dated portrayal of technical details is telling. For example, Welder #2 gets hit in the face with hot metal because he is not wearing a welder's mask. I can understand that maybe they are careless because they are hurrying to rescue a trapped child, and it looks as if, even then, they know better because once this accident happens the boss tells Connery's character to go get a mask before taking over the job.
I think I might be able to solve the mystery of the cloth over the registration numbers of the helicopter. (See Goofs.) The movie is set in Canada but was filmed in the UK. Aircraft registration numbers include a letter that designates the country. The filmmakers did not want to show a British helicopter flying over Canada.
The medical anomalies got to me particularly when the two doctors finally have access to the unconscious victim. They wait until he is taken out to the ambulance before they do anything to check his vitals let alone try to resuscitate him. Today, EMTs and doctors would immediately start working on the patient as soon as they got their hands on him. Way too slow.
(I once asked a retired nurse when she first heard of "ABC", the emergency medicine acronym for prompting immediate attention to "airways, breathing, and circulation", and she said it wasn't until the late '60s, so maybe doctors really were slower to do things in 1957, which would have made them lose a lot more patients than they would a decade later. Worse, back in the 1950s and maybe even into the 1960s, ambulance drivers were often not certified EMTs! I don't recall encountering EMTs until the '70s.)
On some personal notes: This movie was released in late summer 1957 and the boy in the story says that he has just turned six that day (though the actor is actually closer to ten). I myself turned six in September 1957, so I might have identified more with the boy if I had thought about that while watching, but it didn't occur to me until after the film ended.
Victor Winter, who plays the boy, was Scottish and a successful child actor as well as an assistant director and production manager in adulthood. He worked on a film where I was an extra in the early 1980s, "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", although he worked in Macau, China whereas I worked in California, USA.
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