What a waste of my time!!!

Lack of good storyline.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

George Baker and Terrence Morgan play the Mansell Brothers about as different as brothers can get. Baker has gone to London where his gambling has put him in debt with some bad people. He decides to go home to his north of England factory town and hole up there for a bit.Where he's reunited with his rather dull brother Morgan who is a bookkeeper in a factory. His life is enlivened by the presence of Diana Dors who is one high maintenance indulgence for him. But pretty soon she also has Baker's wheels spinning too.Because she's so high maintenance Morgan is short in his accounts at the factory and an audit is coming. Baker's and Dors's solution is rob the place to cover the theft and incidentally pay off the nasty people Baker owes.For all his worldliness Baker himself is no professional criminal so when the Mansell Brothers go out to steal everything goes wrong.Diana Dors was the United Kingdom's answer to Marilyn Monroe. But Monroe even in her most voluptuous role in Niagara had nothing on Diana Dors in Tread Softly Stranger. One look at her you see why Baker and Morgan were goners.Tread Softly Stranger is worth seeing for one sexy bundle from Britain named Diana Dors.

When the British make a "B" movie, they tend to get it right -- and "Tread Softly Stranger" is a good example. George Baker as Johnny has left London and returned to his childhood home -- a scraggy northern town -- to escape the bookmakers who are screaming for his hide. His brother, Dave, a payroll clerk at a local steel mill, is a wimp, hopelessly smitten with next door neighbor Diana Dors. When the brothers set out to heist the mill's payroll, everything that can possibly go wrong does -- no surprise. But there's a nifty twist at the end that certainly is surprising. The atmosphere -- from grubby pubs to the factory's blistering operations -- provide a colorful backdrop. Worth watching.

Johnny Mansell is forced to flee London after running up large gambling debts and returns to his native town, the industrial town of Rawborough, where he moves into a flat with his brother Dave and Dave's girlfriend Calico. (It's a nickname!). The two brothers are, at least on the surface, very different. Johnny is a suave, fashionably dressed playboy, whose sources of income are rather mysterious, whereas the dowdy, bespectacled Dave is a wages clerk in a local steel mill. The outwardly respectable Dave, however, is hiding a guilty secret. He has embezzled £300 from his employers in order to buy expensive gifts for the glamorous but mercenary Calico and desperately needs to repay the money before the auditors make their annual visit to the firm. Johnny believes that he can win enough money in a betting coup, but Calico comes up with a plan for Dave to rob his workplace and to steal enough money to cover his fraud. Dave is desperate enough to go ahead with this plan, and the rest of the film deals with the disastrous consequences of his action. British films noirs, unlike their American counterparts, often included elements of the "kitchen sink realism" which was very much in vogue in the Britain of the late fifties and early sixties, not only in the cinema but also in literature and the visual arts. "Tread Softly Stranger" with its factories and its shabby flats and nightclubs, permeated by an atmosphere of seediness and moral corruption, fits well into this tradition. George Baker's Johnny, a handsome, charming drifter living on the edge of the law but with a certain sense of honour and loyalty, is a classic noir figure. This was the second film which Diana Dors made after returning to Britain following her brief and unsuccessful attempt to conquer Hollywood; the first, "The Long Haul", was also a crime drama. Dors is often thought of as Britain's answer to America's blonde bombshells like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, but on the evidence of this film she could also be seen as the British equivalent of femmes fatales like Lizabeth Scott and Gloria Grahame. American films noirs often featured a beautiful and seductive but dangerous young woman as one of the main characters, and British directors working in the same style sometimes copied this feature. Although there were occasional brunette examples, such as the character played by Ava Gardner in "The Killers", the majority of these women were blonde, possibly because blondes had a greater visual impact in films shot in black-and-white. (This was said to have been the reason why Hitchcock used blondes in so many of his films, although he continued doing so even after he switched to colour). Diana's pneumatic figure and platinum blonde looks meant that she was often cast in comedies, generally with a sexual edge to them, but her real strength was in serious drama. (Although many people thought of her as little more than a sexy bimbo, she was actually a classically trained actress). "Yield to the Night" from two years earlier is often quoted as her greatest achievement in the cinema, but in my view she is equally good here. The two roles are in a sense complementary. Mary, her character in "Yield to the Night", is a murderess, yet is portrayed as a woman more sinned against than sinning. Calico, by contrast, is selfish and amoral, yet it is Dave and Johnny, both of whom have fallen for her charms, who have to pay the price for her selfishness and amorality. The one jarring note in Diana's performance is her accent. In her private life she spoke with a strong West Country accent- she was a native of Swindon- but in her films she generally used the upper-class Received Pronunciation she had learned at drama school, and that sounds wrong here, as Calico is supposed to be a working-class girl who has clawed her way up from the gutter. British film-makers of this period, however, could be curiously careless when it came to regional accents, even when they were aiming for realism in other respects. Rawborough is supposed to be in Yorkshire- Rotherham was used for location filming– but there are hardly any Yorkshire accents to be heard. ("Brief Encounter" is another example of a film ostensibly set in the North where everyone sounds as though they are from the Home Counties). The film did well at the box-office on its original release in 1958 but was generally ignored by the critics; there was a common assumption, on both sides of the Atlantic, that crime dramas, including some which are today regarded as cinema classics, were no more than potboilers. Interest in them, however, has grown over the decades. "Tread Softly Stranger" is not, perhaps, in the same class as the greatest British noirs such as Carol Reed's "The Third Man" or Robert Hamer's "The Long Memory", but with its gripping action, some good acting and its starkly expressionist photography of the industrial scenes it certainly remains worth watching. 7/10

I consider that this title is the late Diana Dors best film and I have quite a few in my DVD collection.Produced in 1958 when she was at her peak she has a memorable scene when she recounts her lowly slum- like upbringing to George Baker of how she made her way "out of the gutter up onto the pavement".It reminded me of an Oscar Wilde quote by Lord Darlington from "Lady Windermere's Fan" "...some of us may be in the gutter but we are looking up at the stars".1958 was the year that the wonderful "A Night to Remember" was made and I spotted three actors from that film in "Tread Softly Stranger", namely Joseph Tomelty" (Joe Ryan) as Dr. O'Loughlin, Russell Napier (Potter) as Capt. Stanley Lord and Thomas Heathcote (Sgt. Lamb) as a 1st class smoking room steward.Diana was well supported by Terence Morgan and George Baker and I disagree with a previous reviewer, it did not have an Anglicized/American script - I checked the nationality of the two scriptwriters James George Minter/Denis O'Dell before writing this review.The film also had an authentic bleak northern industrial landscape.Remember also we have many Irish people working in our country.When George Baker burnt the stolen money and flushed the embers down the sewer and disposed of the revolver I thought the brothers may have succeeded in their robbery, but of course the censor stepped in like they did in the 1950s to ensure we citizens kept on the straight and narrow.Overall I rated it excellent and it kept my interest all through and I rated it 8/10