Supposedly the first film to receive an X certificate, "Cosh Boy" (retitled "The Slasher" for the American market) is very much a film of its time. Set in post-war London the film revolves around young hoodlum Roy Walsh (James Kenney) and his gang of teen delinquents. Their preferred crime is coshing and robbing old ladies, but Roy is ambitious and is soon aiming to get his gang into armed robbery. The film opens with a cautionary written prologue about the dangers of delinquency before plunging the viewer into a milieu of slums, back-alleys and bombsites, where war-widowed mothers struggle to control their wayward sons. The social norms presented in the film are pretty reactionary to modern eyes - the male / female gender roles being particularly anachronistic. The approach of the police is quite interesting as well - when they turn up to arrest Roy, they note that his new step-father is on the verge of physically punishing him with a belt. Rather than intervene and take Roy away they make themselves scare, for ten minutes, to allow a brutal beating to be administered. The film boasts some great black-and-white photography from Jack Asher that captures that post-war feel nicely, while director Lewis Gilbert moves the story along at a relentless pace to its inevitable, crime-doesn't-pay conclusion. The performances are very stagey as was the convention of the with James Kenney delivering a wildly overwrought performance and in Roy a little toe-rag of a character with zero redeeming qualities. A young Joan Collins puts in a decent appearance as Rene, a young girl who falls for Roy and soon finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy, "Cosh Boy" is a hugely interesting film that says quite a bit (some of it intentionally) about the times in which it was set and the fears and anxieties of that time. Some of it is overplayed and it has a tendency to be overly melodramatic but it is still a hugely interesting piece of work. ( )