Un si noble tueur

Many British films make light of The Troubles (like the same team's 'The League of Gentlemen') in stark contrast to the earnestness with which they depict them in dramas.

By contrast this film paints a stark picture of the IRA when they wore trenchcoats and trilbies, the leads as usual played by Brits (and one Canadian) with authentic Irish players making up the supporting cast.

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.

This is a truly woeful effort from Ealing.So much about it is wrong.Most of the actors are ill suited to their roles and end up speaking like Barry Fitzgerald.Characters are underwritten.John Mills part in particular.Also the action is ridiculous.IRA men are taken to serve a sentence in Belfast!When the guards discover an intruder in the docks they don't guess what he is after.John Mills is allowed on a navy ship without question and then gets away.Naturally unshown as the writer could not dream up a plausible way of showing this.Despite the fact that the 2 prisoners have escaped the prison van still shows up at the yard.Difficult to know who the studios were aiming at with this film and little surprise that it had only a short time left of its existence.

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

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.