Crime Scene is a monthly Vague Visages column about the relationship between crime cinema and movie locations. VV’s Tiger Bay essay contains spoilers. J. Lee Thompson’s 1959 film on The Criterion Channel features John Mills, Horst Buchholz and Hayley Mills. Check out more movie coverage in the film essays section.

Tiger Bay in Cardiff doesn’t exist anymore. As a place, a community, as a state of mind, it has long since disappeared. Tiger Bay was gone well before I moved to Cardiff in 2018, and it was gone decades before my family had even moved to the UK, to the neighboring city of Newport, just 20 minutes’ drive away. Tiger Bay the movie captures the old place — working class and racially diverse — long seen by those outside of the area as a den of iniquity, danger and sin, in all its glory. Directed by Bristol-born journeyman J. Lee Thompson, the film presents Bronislaw “Bronek” Korchinsky (Horst Buchholz), a returning Polish sailor on the run for a murder, aided by the young Gillie (Hayley Mills in her first ever film role), who naively sees the opportunity for a life of adventure. Tiger Bay is deeply rooted in its local history and sense of place.

Cardiff is marked by its industrial and post-industrial history; the city’s population exploded during the 19^th century as a port city (so did Newport and Swansea further west), shipping coal mined in the Welsh Valleys around the world. These previously small provincial towns became critical to the economic infrastructure of the British Empire and its colonial, imperial exploits in the Industrial Revolution.

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Boxer’

Tiger Bay sat near the docks of Cardiff on the south side of the city. The area was, and still is, home to one the UK’s oldest multicultural and multiracial communities, thanks to sailors and travelers settling and forming families during the Industrial Revolution (the far-right likes to push the notion that Britain was ethnically homogenous and exclusively white until very recently: Tiger Bay proves otherwise). The racial politics of the time ensured that the Bay quickly earned a reputation as a no-go zone for the morally obsessed Victorians, with plenty of police repression as a result. 

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Television: ‘Franklin’

While the public perception of the Bay as a point of no return was overblown and sensationalized, the region still had a wild side. Tiger Bay was a hardscrabble, working-class area where poverty was rife, as was drinking, gambling and prostitution, with the undertow of violence that comes with that. But, by contemporary accounts of those who lived there, it also produced a strong sense of community, bound by a rejection of the harassment and moral policing they often faced from wider society. 

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘My Policeman’

By the 60s, the moralizers had won out, and plans were made to demolish the vast rows of terraced houses that made up Tiger Bay, replacing them with high-rise council estates. It was presented as slum clearance and regeneration, and while it’s true the area had issues with public health and amenities, it was really a process of annihilating a community perceived as “Other.” Loudon Square, which formed the central meeting point of Tiger Bay, was destroyed, replaced by high rise towers. The waterfront itself was renamed the somewhat more prosaic Cardiff Bay. Before that, though, came Tiger Bay the film.

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’

By this point, Thompson was a respected and highly able craftsman in the British studio system, whose work combined social issue drama with genre thrillers. His films looked ahead to the British New Wave and kitchen sink realism that would explode in the late 50s and 60s, with the arrival of Tony Richardson, Ken Loach and Karel Reisz, though as a product of the studio system, Thompson was never as forthright as his successors. Nevertheless, British success eventually led to a call from Hollywood, as the filmmaker jumped in last minute for Alexander Mackendrick on The Guns of Navarone (1961) before directing his most famous work, the original Cape Fear (1962) with Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck. Thereafter followed a long and largely respectable career in Hollywood, including Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Yet it’s the British work that remains Thompson’s most pointed and focused.

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Television: ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’

Much of Tiger Bay centers around the young girl Gillie not quite recognizing the gravity of her being a witness to Bronek’s murder of his fiancé in the opening scenes. In the killer, she sees an opportunity to escape her own impoverished circumstances for a life of adventure and fun on the high seas, and feels inspired by the movies and the playground games of other children. For Gillie, it’s an uncomfortable contrast with real life, which involves police detective Graham (John Mills, Hayley’s father) attempting to track down the murderer. The cop is frustrated constantly by the girl’s lies and misdirections whenever she is questioned.

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Know the Voice Cast: ‘The Sea Beast’

Much of Tiger Bay was shot on location, either in the eponymous area itself or on the Transporter Bridge in Newport. But, trying to attach these locations to the modern day proves near-impossible. The Cardiff Bay of today and the Tiger Bay of old are completely different places. Cardiff Bay is based around upmarket developments along the waterfront, bringing tourism to the area for the 21^st century, but with little connection to the area’s wider history. Ambitious architecture — such as the Wales Millennium Centre and the Senedd — sits grandly alongside the old Pierhead (visible in the film), where coal deals were struck in the 19^th century. But they’re also located near bland retail boxes housing the same chain restaurants you can find in any other city in the UK. The vision to place Cardiff Bay as the center of Welsh cultural and political life sits awkwardly around anonymous retail blocks and the vanquished, working-class history that first built the area from nothing, even as that working-class history was often written off as minor or meaningless. Meanwhile, the residential areas — now largely social housing — are geographically cut off despite being right next door.

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Television: ‘The Big Door Prize’

It doesn’t go unnoticed that the surviving remnants of the old Cardiff are largely places of business, where millions of pounds exchanged hands back in the day — and indeed, nearly every location from the film I could identify included such a piece of commercial infrastructure. Tiger Bay as a state of mind may be long gone, but Tiger Bay the film remains a document of a place long turned to rubble. And what vital documents.

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Civil War’

Despite Tiger Bay’s racial diversity, there aren’t many speaking roles for non-white actors (there are other British films of the time which do a better job in this regard), but there is a sense of normality and visibility going on in the background of the film: young couples getting married, folks going about daily errands at the shops, kids playing in the street — a community that draws influence from the Caribbean, the Arabic peninsula, the South Asian subcontinent and Welsh Celtic culture (and plenty more). 

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’

Tiger Bay’s conceptualization of the titular location as “normal” is at odds with the screenplay’s requirements for the region to be a place of sin. The chase structure which underpins the film is based around in-groups and out-groups: the police who arrive in the area are totems of law and order, there to rectify the local ne’er-do-well attitudes. Bronek the sailor is an outsider to the Bay, bringing with him suffering but also an idea of freedom. Gillie represents the local caught in-between, her purpose (as far as narrative structure goes) to be torn between Bronek’s dash for freedom and a return to law and order. Tiger Bay forms the nexus of this journey, a place where people fall through the cracks and disappear — into poverty, crime or a life of absence on the high seas — or where they pull themselves up (and out) of the area. It’s a structure which necessitates Tiger Bay being a place of Otherness and amorality.

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Know the Cast & Characters: ‘The Passenger’

And yet, Tiger Bay doesn’t hew to these ideas that seem to underpin its story. Although the film is frank about the poverty and reality of working-class life (or at least, as frank as a 1950s studio-made British film could be), criminality isn’t concretely tied to place and geography. A murder in Cardiff — even in the most rough-and-tumble area — is unusual. The police presence is treated with suspicion; they’re not depicted as corrupt (a common theme in American noirs but exceedingly rare in British cinema, probably a holdover of the country’s obsession with and love of parochial authority), but they’re not depicted as saviors of the place either. 

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘Murder Mystery’

The issues Bronek faces in his journey through the city with Gillie is not always around being on the run from the law per se, but more mundane issues: how to get work at another shipping company without alerting his current employer. How long until Bronek is out into international waters and home free? A key plot point revolves around whether tides and currents place a ship inside or outside international waters and jurisdiction, a typically British pettiness over mere meters.

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘The Veil’

At times, Tiger Bay feels like a crime film with the criminality forgotten. Yes, Bronek is a murderer, but he never feels like an outright criminal, but rather more like a hopeless loser for whom nothing ever goes right. The strange in-between-ness of Tiger Bay is actually a good parallel to what it’s like to live in Cardiff itself — it’s a city that has its own identity but lacks the confidence to look in the mirror and recognize it. It’s a city that’s always desperately trying to be somewhere else: it wants to be a finance and business center like London. Or perhaps Cardiff wants to be a musical and cultural lynchpin like Manchester. It wants to be in touch with its past but also wants to be furiously modern. Let’s make this a destination for tourism, but let’s also knock down as many heritage buildings as possible and replace them with anonymous student flats.

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘The Lost City’

At the time Tiger Bay was made, there wasn’t much film and TV production in Cardiff. Today, there’s plenty, with Hollywood studios regularly using the city as a base, and the BBC and S4C (the Welsh-language national broadcaster) creating plenty of work (The Dark Knight Rises [2012], Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows [2010-11], Doctor Who [2005-22] and Sex Education [2019-23], to name just a few examples). But do any of these depict Cardiff (or any other Welsh cities or towns) with specificity, cultural detail and love? No. It’s a rarity to see Cardiff (or Wales more generally) play itself onscreen, its visual identity forever a mask for somewhere else. Sixty-five years on, Tiger Bay still remains the most convincing rendition of the city I’ve seen — a ragged, ephemeral place that desperately wants to find its feet but isn’t quite sure who it is yet. 

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Know the Cast: ‘Bob Marley: One Love’

Somehow the Cardiff of Tiger Bay feels more sure of itself than the Cardiff of today, a confused city whose identity is being shaped by developers, politicians and consultants not quite smart enough or slick enough to work in London. I’ll be leaving Cardiff soon, and though I’ll miss the people, I don’t know if I’ll miss the place, which seems stuck in a permanent adolescence (the tourism marketeers like to say it’s Europe’s youngest capital). It’s a city which wants to be ordered, pleasant and liveable yet also wild, youthful and energetic. Much like Tiger Bay’s protagonist Gillie, Cardiff doesn’t actually know what it wants. And just like Gillie, who by the end of the film is right back where she started, the city feels like it’s constantly in a cycle of rebirth, decay and redevelopment without fully completing any of those stages. So, this is half of a crime film for half of a city, a place still figuring out what it is and unsure whether to go full steam ahead or anchor itself in one place.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

Tiger Bay Essay: Related — Soundtracks of Cinema: ‘The Lost City’