Give Us Tomorrow

Give Us Tomorrow is a 1978 British crime film directed by Donovan Winter and starring Sylvia Syms, Derren Nesbitt and James Kerry.

The placidly well-to-do surroundings of Orpington effectively offset the criminal exploits, and the clown masks worn by the bank raiders provide an appropriate (if not altogether original) touch of distorting horror.

Once the action is restricted to the bank manager's home, however, the movie bogs down in reams of static dialogue, with Derren Nesbitt alternately loosing four-letter invective at middle-class respectability and hymning the homely virtues of a pot of char, and Sylvia Syms either castigating him as the scum of the earth or primly correcting his pronunciation of Cinzano.

A situation familiar from Andrew Stone's The Night Holds Terror, and from sundry less memorable airings in the cinema and on TV – not for nothing, one feels, does the young hoodlum justify himself with "you see it all the time on the telly" – never creates a persuasive tension here.

There is not even much impact in the climactic action, in which the lead heavy lets himself be gunned down so easily that one might think he recognised the ultimate right to win of the (surprisingly small) police contingent.