Johnny Mansell has fled to the Yorkshire steel town of Rawborough, once his home town, after racking up large gambling debts in London. He moves into a cramped boarding house where his brother Dave, a clerk in a local steel mill, was already living; Dave has a girlfriend Calico, a hostess in a local nightclub, who lives close by and their flats have neighbouring flat roof spaces, which the three often use. Johnny discovers that Dave has been stealing money from the mill where he works, spending the money on Calico. While Johnny works on a scheme to get enough money to cover up Dave’s fraud and pay off his own debts with a win on the racetrack, Calico comes up with her own plan for the brothers to steal the payroll at Dave's workplace and pay off their debts with the proceeds. Although Johnny wins the money at the track, he is robbed by gangsters from London who recognise him there and instead, the brothers try to carry out Calico’s plan to steal the payroll but they mistakenly kill a night watchman, the father of their best friend in the town, with a gun that Calico lent Dave.
Kinematograph Weekly listed it as being "in the money" at the British box office in 1958[4] and had "scored" commercially.[5]
Critical reception
In British Sound Films: The Studio Years 1928–1959David Quinlan wrote: ''Thriller has silly dialogue, fails to make use of Rotheram backgrounds.''[6]
Leslie Halliwell wrote: "Hilarious murky melodrama full of glum faces, with a well-worn trick ending; rather well photographed."[7]
The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 1/5 stars, writing: "The big question here is, what on earth were Diana Dors, Terence Morgan and George Baker doing in such a dreary little film? Director Gordon Parry was capable of making involving pictures, but here he insists on his cast delivering each line as if it had the dramatic weight of a Russian novel, which is more than a little preposterous for a petty melodrama about criminal brothers falling for the same girl."[8]
Release
Tread Softly Stranger received its first DVD release in the UK in 2008.
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