Classification:

Ted Willis was a writer with a sympathetic eye for problems of the middle and lower classes. Again teamed up with director J. Lee Thompson, his No Trees in the Street plays out a seamy slice of life in a London slum of the late 1930s. Film is played on a violently strident note. Willis hammers home the point that people are more important than places.

The slim story line shows how the various larger-than-life characters face up to the challenge of the Street. The drab blowsy mother (Joan Miller) who has given up long ago. Her daughter (Sylvia Syms), longing to get away from it with her young brother, but lacking the resources or the courage. The boy racketeer (Herbert Lom), who has made money by shady activities and now ruthlessly rules the Street.

Syms gives a moving performance as the gentle girl who refuses to marry the cheap racketeer just to escape. Lom, as the opportunist who dominates the street, is sufficiently suave and unpleasant. Stanley Holloway is a bookmaker's tout with the cheerful philosophy that the world's gone mad.