Crosstrap (found British crime film; 1962)

Laurence Payne, one of the stars of the film.

Status: Lost

Crosstrap is a 1962 British B-crime film directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, starring Laurence Payne and Jill Adams, and based on a novel by John Newton Chance. The plot involves a young couple who get caught up in a gang war in the English countryside. This film is the directorial debut of Hartford-Davis, one of the most prolific directors in British exploitation cinema, and features unusually graphic violence for the early 1960's. This led one reviewer to describe it as "a climactic bloodbath where corpses bite the dust as freely as Indians in a John Ford western."

Upon its initial release, Crosstrap was shown as a supporting film in British cinemas, where it recieved generally negative reviews by critics, being labeled "brawny but brainless" by Kine Weekly magazine and "overacted, ludicrous, and amateurish" by the Monthly Film Bulletin. Five years later, the film was re-released by another distributor, possibly in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the then recently-released Night of the Big Heat, which was also based on a novel by Chance. After this, the film disappeared with little indication of its screenings.

As with Hartford-Davis' later film Nobody Ordered Love, Crosstrap is listed by the British Film Institute as one of their 75 Most Wanted features. For unknown reasons, the BFI never included the film in their archives, and all attempts to locate the prints have proven futile. Given the scarcity of surviving materials, it's unlikely that the film will be found.