The current peace between Britain and Ireland has lasted longer than I think anybody had expected. I wonder if I’m the only person who wonders exactly how permanent that might be.
1952’s The Gentle Gunman was made at a particularly difficult period of “the troubles”, and so I was surprised a UK studio would attempt a movie on this topic. And it walks a fine line, even if its moralizing is a bit heavy handed.
John Mills and Dirk Bogarde play brothers which, while both are fine actors, beggars belief. Each also employs an Irish accent that rang as dodgy to even these Yank ears. For much of the runtime, they seem to forget they are supposed to be Irish, which is just as well.
Bogarde is still in the cause, and Mills is his brother who has since gone to England to become a detective. Most of the film leaves it up in the air as to which Mills will be most faithful to: his brother, his newly adopted country or the cause.
He at least saves his brother’s skin in the first scene he’s in. Bogarde has brought a suitcase bomb down to a tube station and, of course, children start playing around it. While he is clearly torn as to whether or intervene, Mills runs up and hurls the case into the tunnel, where it immediately explodes.
Mills also helps get Bogarde back to the home country, raising the suspicions of the local IRA faction leader (Robert Beatty). That character’s name is Shinto, which confused me, as I did not realize that was an Irish name. All I could think of is Cabin in the Woods, where Japan’s effort to appease the old gods fails, prompted Bradley Whitford’s technician to say, “What a friend we have in Shinto.”
Unbeknownst at first to the other characters, Mills has snuck his way back into the country. Back there, he’ll eventually run into Elizabeth Sellars, a firm believer in the cause, so much so that she terminated her relationship with Mills after what she regards as his treachery, only to take up with Bogarde. Her mother (Barbara Mullen) is sick of the conflict which took the life of her husband. Beatty also, against her wishes, recruits her young son (James Kenney) into the cause, giving him the gun that had been his father’s.
Kenney is going to Belfast to work the docks. It is there he steals information concerning the arrival of a ship carrying two fellow fighters being brought to prison after their capture in Britain. A scheme is devised to liberate the prisoners from the ship and get them to freedom, and this tests the loyalties of both brothers to not just the cause but to each other.
The performances are very solid all around, despite the dodgy accents of Mills and Bogarde. Sellars is an especially interesting and repellant character, seemingly only able to love the next man most likely to die. As Mullen tells her: “I think it’s death you’re in love with.”
Filming was done largely on location, with the integration of some realistic sets. Camerawork is solid, though largely unremarkable, the exception being a shootout on the streets at the climax, captured through shaky handheld camera.
The Gentle Gunman is a moderately engaging film, though largely because, given the situation at the time it was made, it is a wonder it exists at all. It clearly tries not to take sides, though it is inevitable it will eventually have to favor one over the other. As a character sums up the situation they’re in: “A man cannot be true to himself without being a traitor to something.”
Dir: Basil Dearden
Starring John Mills, Dirk Bogarde, Robert Beatty
Watched on StudioCanal UK blu-ray (region B)