The Gentle Gunman (1952)

User Rating:

6.9/10   

Director:

Basil Dearden

Writers:

Roger MacDougall (play)
Roger MacDougall (screenplay)

Release Date:

10 October 1953 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

IRA member Terry modifies his violent views after working undercover in wartime London. As a result he see to it that his co-conspirators are arrested...

Plot Keywords:

Ealing | Based On Play

Cast

John Mills	...	Terence Sullivan
Dirk Bogarde	...	Matt Sullivan
Robert Beatty	...	Shinto
Elizabeth Sellars	...	Maureen Fagan
Barbara Mullen	...	Molly Fagan
Eddie Byrne	...	Flynn
Joseph Tomelty	...	Dr Brannigan
Gilbert Harding	...	Henry Truethome
James Kenney	...	Johnny Fagan
Lian Redmond	...	Conolly
Jack MacGowran	...	McGuire
Michael Golden	...	Murphy
Stephen Dunne	...	Brennan (as Michael Dunne)
Patricia Stewart	...	Girl at the docks
Harry Brogan	...	Barney

Runtime:

86 min

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Sound System)

Certification:

USA:Approved (PCA #15853) | Sweden:15

Filming Locations:

Ealing Studios, Ealing, London, England, UK

Company:

Michael Balcon Productions

Everything is relative ... even the impact of terrorism

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.