The 1959 film Serious Charge, directed by Terence Young, may well have slipped beneath the radar of youth audiences then and later. It was promoted as being the debut movie role of Cliff Richard, a draw for some but by no means all of the teenage demographic.

Cliff, talented entertainer and darling of huge sections of the public for seven decades, was never cool, never edgy. Try as he might to look like one of the film’s gang of ‘delinquents’ who cause trouble in the fictional small town of Bellington — located in Stevenage — he doesn’t really convince. In spite of his leather jacket, narrow trousers and quiff, he looks like the nice boy next door. Indeed, when things turn violent at the youth club, he’s the one who says they were just leaving.

If you weren’t paying attention, both the film’s title and its depiction of wild teenagers might have misled you into thinking that the movie would be another exploration of the gap between an out-of-control generation and their elders. To an extent it is — but it’s much more than that.

Champion of second chances

The central character is a vicar, the Reverend Howard Phillips, a complex figure convincingly played by Anthony Quayle. He’s not a trendy, ‘down with the kids’ type, but he is basically on the side of the local youth population, from the petty criminals and tearaways to the good girl in trouble.

He believes in forgiveness and second chances. He speaks up in court for youngsters facing sentencing, notably for Cliff’s character Curley Thompson, who looks set to follow in the footsteps of his really unpleasant older brother Larry, played by Andrew Ray.

Howard brings to his crusading role his experience as a padre in the Parachute Regiment and his expertise in boxing and football. He also seems no stranger to violence. When the youth club dance (some nice jiving and fancy footwork) is disrupted by Larry and his posse, threatening the vicar with a bicycle chain and knuckledusters, Howard gets right in there, takes them on and sees them off. Howard actually finds forgiveness difficult. His instinct is not to turn the other cheek. This instinct challenges his faith and makes him doubt his calling.

Alien nation

So Howard has an enemy in Larry Thompson, and he also alienates the woman who is in love with him. Hester is the daughter of the previous vicar, and lives nearby with her retired father. She presents herself as a 30-year-old spinster, frustrated with her lot in life, a stalwart of the church who longs for something different.

However, she is not just the passive doer of good works and keeper of the flower rota. She visits Howard one evening, noticing in passing a girl leaving the vicarage by another door, and frustrated by Howard’s lack of interest in her, she takes the initiative and comes on to him. He is taken aback and gently rejects her. In her embarrassment and humiliation, Hester assumes that Howard is having an affair with his secret visitor. In fact, the visitor was Mary, the pregnant abandoned girlfriend of Larry, who Howard had been supporting and counselling.

Mary’s not around for long. On her way home, she sees Larry in a clinch with another girl, the sexy French home-help at the vicarage (bit of a cliche this) who is meant to be young enough for the agency which placed her to be responsible to her parents for her wellbeing, but who is played by a lovely Lilian Brousse who looks old enough to — well, you know. A distraught Mary steps in front of a car and is killed. Howard calls out Larry for Mary’s death, a bit unfairly perhaps.

Very angry young man

So we come to the serious charge, which is not a bit of breaking into the local lido and smashing a window to get towels, as seen earlier. Angry and vindictive, Larry goes to the vicarage, smashes up a room and says he was acting in self-defence because Howard sexually assaulted him (or interfered with him, as it was put back then). Hester arrives on the scene, and chooses to bear witness to Larry’s story.

Apart from the assault factor, homosexual behaviour was illegal until 1967. The coded signs add up — a single man, a vicar, living with his mother, with no obvious interest in women, who has rejected one woman who would have made an ideal wife. Howard is ostracised and decides he has to give up his job and leave town. Hester eventually does the right thing though, trapping Larry in a scene of seduction, which she stages very convincingly for a no-practice spinster… And finally we see hints that she and Howard have a future together.

There are some notable ‘spots’ in the film. The gang includes Jess Conrad, who has forged a career almost as long as Cliff’s; and Philip Lowrie, who was to appear in Coronation Street the following year as Dennis Tanner, son of the street’s fabled Elsie Tanner. Wilfred Brambell plays the church verger. He found fame in the 1960s as rag-and-bone man Albert Steptoe in Steptoe and Son.

But my favourite ‘spot’ is a picture on the vicarage wall. It’s a print of Salvador Dali’s painting Christ of St John of the Cross. This is a controversial work by an avant garde artist, painted in 1951. The painting can be seen in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, a subject of interest to many, including art critics such as Jonathan Jones, and poet John Cooper Clarke. It seems a fitting choice for Howard Phillips, a complex and troubled man of religion.