The Gentle Gunman

Hard to understand the mediocre reviews for this classic. Don't be put off - The Gentle Gunman is a must-see.

The story is engrossing - reminiscent of better-known Irish-revolution films like Odd Man Out and The Informer, and every bit their equal. The two brothers - one headstrong, the other cool and clever - are perfectly matched in a love-hate duel to the death.

The casting is hard to beat - John Mills and Dirk Bogarde together in one film. Wow. The supporting parts are excellent as well, especially Elizabeth Sellars in an unusually negative role.

Then there's Basil Dearden, one of the best UK directors of the 1950s, doing what is surely his best work ever. The photography is breathtaking, especially the scenes out in the hills of Ireland. These contrast perfectly with the dark and gritty scenes in London.

Unlike so many films dealing with the IRA, The Gentle Gunman manages to embrace both heartbreak and hope, while detouring expertly from the obvious love and revenge subplots.

I don't hand out 10/10 ratings lightly, but in this case it's barely sufficient.

I think I tried to watch this many years ago but was put off by the grim scenery and confused Irish history but just watched it through today and it was quite interesting.

Lots of long dead actors proving just how few actors were working in poverty stricken UK in 1050s. Elizabeth Sellars enigmatic smile used often.

Bleak moorland settings with lonely roads, city views with endless grim terraces, ethnic steretyping galore, cliffhanging last scene.

Car chases look more like Keystone Cops action with the miserable old British cars that thankfully were not worth preserving.

Well worth watching if you like real history.

Directed by Basil Dearden and adapted to screenplay from his own play by Roger MacDougal, The Gentle Gunman finds John Mills and Dirk Bogarde as brothers in the IRA circa 1941. Matt (Bogarde) is the young and hungry in the name of the cause brother, Terence (Mills) has grown tired of the violence and questions the IRA's methods. This puts a strain on their relationship, whilst it also puts Terence on a collision course with the IRA superiors who brand him as a traitor.

The Irish Troubles has never been an easy subject to broach in movies, the political stand point of the film makers invariably leaning towards bias. Whilst critics and reviewers have to battle with their own convictions when trying to stay firmly on the fence. The Gentle Gunman is an attempt at being an anti violence movie, one with a "gentle" pro British slant from that most British of film studios, Ealing. Unfortunately it's tonally all over the place, awash with a mixed bunch of characters that range from apparent comic relief, to rabid Irish terrorists and a town crier like British bigot. Things are further put into the realm of the unbelievable by Mills and Bogarde trying to hold down Irish accents, a shame because without the fluctuation of the vocal chords the performances are rather good.

It's also a bit too stagey and the pace often drags itself into a stupor, making the adequate action scenes act more as a merciful release than anything truly exciting. On the plus side the film looks amazing at times, with Gordon Dines (The Blue Lamp) on cinematography dealing firmly in film noir filters. Which goes some way to explain how the film has come to be in a couple of reference books about British noir. But really it's a marginal entry and all told it's just a routine drama from a Studio who were much better in other genre spheres. 6/10

I could only rate this 5/10 mainly because of the atrocious casting.I do not accept Ealing Films could not cast this film in 1952 with more authentic Irish actors in the principal roles.Consider they casted these leads:John Mills, Dirk Bogarde (English) wobbly accents, Robert Beatty (Canadian) wobbly accent, Elizabeth Sellars (Scottish) wobbly accent.Ironically Eddie Byrne whom I always thought as Irish was actually born in Birmingham, England and Barbara Mullen was actually born in Massachusets, USA.A real mixed bag of actors and accents which completely destroyed the believability of this film for me.I suppose their drama academies had not taught them authentic Irish accents and had dredged every vernacular out of them in their quest for received pronunciation.

The part of "The Gentle Gunman" I enjoyed most were the verbal duels of Gilbert Harding ("What's My Line 1950s BBC TV version;Face to Face with John Freeman) with the actor who played old doctor O'Loughlin (from "A Night To Remember" 1958) and a Mrs Doyle (Father Ted) type woman operating the telephone exchange at an Irish post office.Film producers have an awful tendency to romanticise IRA type figures in films.

As fate would have it, I bought a low price DVD with this movie shortly before the bomb attacks on the London underground on July 7th, 2005. I suppose the story is based on real facts. Members of the IRA planted bombs in London's underground system during WW II. This is what happens in the first part of this movie anyway, and an amazing amount of footage seems to have been shot on real locations. Dirk Bogarde plays the young Irishman who deposits the suitcase with the time bomb on a station platform full with families and children who are bedding down for a night during the Blitz, John Mills is his older brother, also a member of the terrorist gang but beset by moral qualms. He follows the Bogarde character and manages to throw the bomb into the tunnel just before it explodes.

Basically this is a story about the questioning of causes and of the justification of terrorist acts, specially in relation to the situation in Northern Ireland. In this aspect it is not unlike Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, made a few years earlier. The main character takes a critical view of the actions of the terrorists who in turn suspect him of being a traitor (not without reason). The action soon moves to an isolated road house on the Green Island, the base of the gang, and the point is clearly made, that all the actions of the terrorist are senseless and just cause harm to many innocent people without achieving anything but generating more suffering and hate.

What is really interesting for a viewer of our days about this movie is how the issue of terrorism is treated. The terrorists are basically presented as misguided dimwits who will never be able to shake the system. Compared with how terrorism is regarded today this treatment struck me as being a very mild and strangely relaxed view of people ready to commit atrocities. But then I came to understand that even terrorism and its impact have to be relativised. Compared with the surface bombings by German planes during the Blitz (a memory certainly still very fresh in 1952), the damages caused by a group of terrorists must have seemed very limited indeed.