The Siege of Sidney Street

The Siege of Sidney Street, also known as The Siege of Hell Street, is a 1960 British historical drama film co-directed by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman, and starring Donald Sinden, Nicole Berger, Kieron Moore and Peter Wyngarde.

The film dramatises the 1909 Tottenham Outrage – a bungled wages-snatch which resulted in the murder of a police officer and a ten-year-old bystander as well as the deaths of the two armed robbers – and the 1911 Siege of Sidney Street, in which armed personnel of the Metropolitan Police and Scots Guards surrounded a house in East End of London occupied by a gang who had killed three City of London Police officers during a bungled attempt to break into a jeweller's shop. The film depicts the two events as both taking place in 1911 and as both being the work of the same gang.

• Donald Sinden as Mannering
• Nicole Berger as Sara
• Kieron Moore as Toska
• Peter Wyngarde as Peter
• Godfrey Quigley as Blakey
• Leonard Sachs as Svaars
• Tutte Lemkow as Dmitrieff
• Bart Bastable as Sergeant Tucker
• George Pastell as Brodsky
• Angela Newman as Nina
• T. P. McKenna as Lapidos
• Maurice Good as Gardstein
• James Caffrey as Hefeld
• Harold Goldblatt as Hersh
• Christopher Casson as Police Commissioner
• Harry Brogan as Old Harry
• Alan Simpson as Uniformed Police Inspector
• Jimmy Sangster as Winston Churchill (uncredited cameo)

It was filmed at Ardmore Studios in Ireland, with shots of Dublin standing in for pre-First World War East London.

Donald Sinden, then a contract star for the Rank Organisation at Pinewood Studios, recalled

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "The anarchist outrages are shown more or less as they happened, with scenes reconstructed from old newspaper photographs and a convincing-looking Winston Churchill (Jimmy Sangster) superintending the final battle as Home Secretary. But instead of sticking to the facts, which were astonishing enough, the film is spiced with the pseudo-thrills of a novelettish romance – attempted rape, pastiche Russian music and a glut of melodramatic clichés. To make matters worse, the characterisation is glib, important incidents are presented obscurely and banal dialogue over; emphatically delivered."