Reviews & Ratings for
The Gentle Gunman More at IMDbPro »

11 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Everything is relative ... even the impact of terrorism, 7 December 2005

Author: manuel-pestalozzi from Zurich, Switzerland

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.

2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
rarely seen post-war English drama, 22 November 2010

Author: Michael Neumann from United States

This small gem of a thriller is set in the ambiguous battleground of Northern Ireland during World War Two, where a hotheaded young Irish patriot (i.e. terrorist) learns his older and wiser brother (a disenchanted ex-IRA soldier) has been suspected by his old comrades of duplicity. It may not be a classic, but the film offers plenty of action, some unobtrusive melodrama, and a script that never strays too far from the larger issues. The optimistic ending may ring false, but it at least provides a memorable punch line, when an Englishman and his Irish companion are shown celebrating their differences with a toast. Says the Britisher: "To England, where the situation is serious but never hopeless", to which the Irishman replies: "To Ireland, where the situation is hopeless but never serious."

Gilbert Harding!!, 20 April 2012

Author: Billy Pilgrim from United Kingdom

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Two reasons for picking it up, Gilbert Harding in a film (my only knowledge of him was Whats my line and the Face to Face), and an Ealing film.

I had known the IRA had bombed London in the war, and it was an interesting take on the story. The IRA cell get sprung (but are chased by the police in an unresolved plot end) but for the time it is even handed. I cant imagine Hollywood making a film that has sympathetic Al Qaeda characters.

Yes it is wooden acting, but it passed an evening, I also picked up two Will Hay Ealing films at the same time, which I have yet to watch. The connection being that Oh Mr Porter! is a film about IRA gunrunning.

Grumpy Gilbert Harding Acting!!, 1 January 2012

Author: (howardmorley@aol.com) from United Kingdom

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.

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