The Gentle Gunman

The title  The Gentle Gunman belongs on a heartwarming kiddie movie produced by the NRA.  But this is an English production from 1952, when attacks by the Irish Republican Army continued to be an ongoing threat in Northern Ireland. Topics that hot are not typical fare for any country’s film industry. When English movies on the subject did get made, they usually didn’t address the political conflict head-on. Carol Reed’s famed  Odd Man Out uses rebel violence as a backdrop for a broad, almost abstract statement about the human condition. Set in wartime, Gilliat and Launder’s earlier  I See A Dark Stranger is a spy caper about a foolish Irish woman who becomes a spy for the Germans. She’s seen as sympathetic, but deluded. During the war, only the ‘Archers’ Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger dared make films that looked past the ongoing fight for national survival, to the eventual reconciliation of enemies.

Ireland stayed neutral in both World Wars, and English editorials had a chore convincing the average Londoner that every Irishman wasn’t working on the side of the enemy. The situation pops up in a number of English movies. One of the least apologetic is Ronald Neame’s excellent  The Man Who Never Was from 1956. In that show a young Stephen Boyd is an Irish agent for the Nazis, who despises everything English while trying to outfox Navy intelligence.

The Gentle Gunman is from a play by Roger MacDougall, the respected screenwriter of Ealing’s  The Man in the White Suit and the playwright behind Philip Leacock’s odd  Escapade, a light drama about an English boy who steals a plane to fly to Vienna with a pacifist petition. MacDougall also wrote the screenplay for The Gentle Gunman, retaining his play’s high-minded sentiments.

The film begins well, with an Irish doctor (Joseph Tomelty) and an Englishman (radio personality Gilbert Harding) in a candid, spirited debate about the English occupation and the militant Irish response. The direct arguments don’t stop there, for MacDougall has made each of his characters into a walking, talking political position. The thriller aspect of the story is good, whenever the message-making gets out of the way.

We of course shouldn’t expect the movie to be ‘fair minded’ about violent terrorism. Another English thriller from the 1950s concerned with  rubber planters fighting rebels in Malaya, never defines them as anti-colonial independence movement, just murderous bandits. The Gentle Gun is thoughtful and sympathetic to the Irish patriots, even as it denounces their movement as completely wrong-headed.

We’re amused to be told by Indicator’s extras that one reason the English public didn’t embrace the movie was not its subject matter or politics — almost every review complained about the lack of convincing Irish accents by the star players.

Near the border between occupied and free Ireland, a militant cell is sending militants to London. With the blitz underway, they are making a political statement by exploding bombs in the Underground. Young Matt Sullivan (Dirk Bogarde) arrives at the London flat to find that the two Irish bomb makers Connolly and Patsy (Liam Redmond & Jack MacGowran) are convinced that Matt’s brother Terry (John Mills), a more experienced rebel, has turned traitor. Matt volunteers to deliver a suitcase bomb in Terry’s place, but everything goes wrong. Connolly and Patsy are captured and Matt must flee back to Ireland.

Matt feels compelled to compensate for his disloyal brother. No sooner is he back than his cell leader Shinto (Robert Beatty) puts him into action again. There’s a chance of freeing the convicted bomb-makers, who are being transported to prison in Belfast, not far away. Shinto and Flynn (Eddie Byrne) want to use Matt and the very young dockworker Johnny Fagan (James Kenney) to find out when the prisoners’ ship arrives. Johnny’s father has already died for the Cause, and Johnny is eager to fight, despite the pleas of his mother Molly (Barbara Mullen) to stay clear of Shinto. Complicating things is Johnny’s sister Maureen Fagan (Elizabeth Sellars), who has become a vicious fanatic about the Cause. Maureen was Terry’s girlfriend, but now she supports Matt.

Just as the ship carrying Connolly and Patsy arrives in Belfast harbor, Terry Sullivan shows up. He tells his brother that he’s just an honest man who’s changed his mind. Can Terry keep Matt and Johnny from becoming more casualties of a pointless war?  Shinto and Maureen take the hard line — they want Terry executed as a traitor.

The Gentle Gunman benefits from excellent locations in Ireland. The countryside is a treeless heath, not a verdant garden as in John Ford’s  The Quiet Man. The exciting opening was filmed in the London Underground — those famed escalators — where Matt is tasked with planting a bomb. The intention is only to scare people. But with air raids underway, the subway platforms are filled with Londoners. Anywhere Matt places his bomb, we would think the concussion would hurt everyone present.

Basil Dearden and his producing partner Michael Relph made films about issues normally avoided, including key pictures about race prejudice ( Sapphire) and homosexuals ( Victim). Their popular genre thrillers also had a dimension of social comment:  The Mind Benders,  All Night Long,  The League of Gentlemen,  The Blue Lamp and the recommended  Pool of London.

Dearden’s direction can’t do much with some scenes that still feel like they belong on a theater stage. The actors are excellent but the roles are as rigid as some of the blocking. Characters enter almost as if awaiting their cues, and then declaim their point of view in close-up. Mrs. Fagan’s function is to seize the spotlight every few minutes to plead her case. The woman has lost a husband and fears losing her son to patriotic madness; her weary face never seems to change. Meanwhile, the beautiful Maureen simmers on the sidelines. She hates the Brits and has decided that it is her job to motivate the young men to violent action.

There are powerful moments with a more dynamic approach. At one point Dearden and cameraman Gordon Dines ( The Cruel Sea) capture a conversation between Maureen and Matt in stylized profiles. The shots are arrestingly beautiful, and suggest that the theatrical artifice of the script might have benefitted with a matching visual treatment. But the direction overall takes pains to avoid making the Irish militants seem glamorous.

The story resolves itself in action not that much different than that of the later  Shake Hands with the Devil. Both films feature in an IRA gunfight on a dock, a futile exercise that condemns extremist violence. Ma Fagan suffers while Shinto, Flynn and the others maintain a commitment to open-ended revenge. Young blood like the eager Johnny and the confused Matt have been primed to become martyrs to a tradition of killing. It’s a paternalistic view — the Irish rebels are like bad boys in need of guidance. They get drunk and sing the pro-IRA song The Highwayman.

The depiction of police activity appears influenced by government advisors concerned about PR optics. The occupying English in Northern Ireland are called ‘The Specials,’ but we never really see any in action, just some scattered police. In London, Scotland Yard remains patient and law-abiding. Immediately after an Irish bomb explodes in the Underground, a calm inspector lets Matt Sullivan go with the adage that ‘we can’t go around arresting every Irishman we see.’

The Brit anti-terror cops give the Irish informer Terry Sullivan the freedom to interfere with police actions, and to travel to and from Belfast. Terry is seemingly protected by a halo of pacifism. He is captured more than once by Shinto but soon escapes. He singlehandedly effects another double escape of two comrades. That’s some dicey plotting … when the gunsmoke clears, if a ‘Special’ be killed, will the Brit authorites change their minds about Terry?

We have to admire John Mills’ basic appeal — his saintly Terry delivers airy pacifist speeches yet doesn’t come off as a flower child. We don’t revolt at Mills’ suggestion that all this rebellion nonsense should just be stopped and forgotten, along with 400 years of oppression. The direction continually stresses the threat posed to civilians and children, in the London Tubes and the streets of Belfast. Who isn’t against stopping the killing of innocents?  If only things were as simple as that. A more accurate look at the ‘Irish problem’ is Paul Greengrass’s thoroughly depressing 2002 docudrama  Bloody Sunday.

The actors alone are a reason to catch up with this now-obscure thriller. Dirk Bogarde hadn’t yet commenced his ‘Doctor’ series, and was doing well in featured roles in things like Dearden’s The Blue Lamp and Terence Fisher’s  So Long at the Fair. His stardom would build slowly over the next 6 years or so. Canadian Robert Beatty was excellent support in everything but never achieved star status; the murderous resolve of his Shinto holds this drama together, while everyone else is questioning their motives.

For the genuine Irishmen in the cast, English productions offered the best opportunities for paid film work. Their winning personalities bring Roger MacDougall’s dialogues to life, presumably using ‘acceptable’ accents: Joseph Tomelty ( The Sound Barrier)  ↖  , Liam Redmond ( Night of the Demon), Eddie Byrne ( Jack the Ripper,  The Mummy), and of course Jack MacGowran ( Cul-De-Sac,  The Fearless Vampire Killers)  ↗  . MacGowran looks impossibly young; he and Liam Redmond are terrific together.

James Kenney must have had terrific management, for he seemed to get every major teen-in-trouble role. Like Dirk Bogarde in The Blue Lamp, he played a vicious delinquent opposite Joan Collins in  Cosh Boy.

The intelligent-looking Elizabeth Sellars always makes a strong impression in everything from Leo Marks’  Cloudburst to the hand-wringing spouses of  The Man in the Sky and  55 Days at Peking. Ms. Sellars also has the distinction of delivering one of the more classic lines of dialogue in film history, in Joe Mankiewicz’s  The Barefoot Contessa. At a party, the Spanish star Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner) is dissed by a woozy blonde:

Woozy blonde:  “She hasn’t even got what I’ve got.”Sellars:  “What she’s got you couldn’t spell … and what you’ve got, you used to have.” 

Sellars’ Maureen Fagan is a fanatic made resolute by the death of her father; she encourages both Terry and then Matt to sacrifice themselves in the Cause. But we don’t see any further into the characterization. It’s up to another character to spell out what the movie should be making us feel without words, that Maureen ‘doesn’t love her men, because she’s in love with Death.’ Whether or not the IRA or the rebellion have merit, The Gentle Gunman reduces the Cause to a deplorable Death Pact.