Hunted (1952)

What a beautiful movie!

Absolutely Fantastic

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

The key word is "What do you think girls marry sailors for?", the scornful reply of his wife's lover which triggers the tragedy and opens the stage for the development of an abyss of humanity. It's a fugitive epic, like an old Icelandic saga, as there is no end to this Golgatha walk of constantly more worrying and heart-rending tribulations of a man getting lost in life by over-reacting to a shock, which under the circumstances is perfectly natural, like a crime passionel, and finds a very singular companion to his troubles in small boy escaping from home and the tortures by his step-father.Dirk Bogarde is good as always and finds himself perfectly at home in this harrowing walk through hell to nowhere ending up in a paradox of freedom where he finds no other choice than to resign just as he finally found a way out. It's not his misfortune or his suffering that guides him but the small boy who ever and again compels him to choose a path leading him on to unknown territory of his previous human experience and deciding his fate. That makes this a very educating ordeal and truly a film out of the ordinary if not extremely unique. It's very unpleasant for its arduous trials but has to make you a different person afterwards with a lot more sober perspective to yourself and reality. It gets you outside of yourself as it compels you to empathize with these two outlawed characters in search of an alternative to the reality which has treated them with irrepairable injustice to the point of extreme abuse without finding it or anything else than even deeper despair and trouble. This fate teaches you something, but you have to find the lesson by yourself after the film has ended. This is a film you can't escape from, but you have to see it again some time for its wholesome and purging trials. It's life at the edge of what you can endure, tested to extremity.

In the 1950s, Dirk Bogarde played three main sorts of roles in films--sailors or soldiers, the nice Dr. Sparrow in the Doctor movies as well as complete sociopaths. Of these roles, the sociopaths are by far the most interesting to watch. During this time, he often played murderers and crooks on the run. So, when I first started watching "The Stranger in Between", it came as no surprise as he's once again playing a murderer on the run! However, as the film progresses you realize that this seemingly simple film has a lot more depth to it--depth that make it a standout picture.When the movie begins, a cute little boy is hiding after he'd been playing with matches. He stumbles into the hiding place of Chris (Bogarde)--a guy who is wanted for murder! Chris doesn't want to let the boy go--he could tell people where he's hiding. So he convinces the boy that the police are looking for BOTH of them and they set off together on a cross-country run to avoid capture.About midway through this movie, you start to notice some things that make it interesting. Chris isn't just a mindless killer--his motivations and what he did exactly aren't quite so black and white. The boy also is not just some scared kid--he's been terribly abused and in some ways he's better off on the run with a killer than staying in his former life! The film also has a few unexpectedly nice moments between the two. Chalk this up to excellent acting, writing and direction. Where is this all going? Well, see the film to find out for yourself.

This film has the feeling of having been extensively edited.There seems to be the first reel missing.Bogarde and the boy are on the bomb site without any explanation,this now has to come late in explanatory dialogue.After starting out to be a standard fugitive film it develops into a sort of reverse 39 Steps.The problem is that with each step taken by Bogarde his reason for keeping the boy seems even more implausible..After all since he will be having a date with Albert Pierrepoint you would think that the last thing he would want to be lumbered with is a child.I am no fan of films featuring young children,of which there were many in the 1859s.So I am afraid that I found this film to be a bit of a pain.

***SPOILERS*** The most unusual thing about this movie is that the person who's really the center of attraction and the reason all that happens in it someone called Mr.Wills isn't even in the films credits and isn't even, as far as I can see, played by a living person or actor but by a store front mannequin. It's in this bombed out building, during the London Blitz, that we see sailor Chris Lloyd, Dirk Bogarde, together with this six year old runaway little Robbie Campball, Jon Whiteley,just shooting the breeze where in the foreground we see this stiff, Mr. Willis, laying on the ground in the early stages of rigor mortis. How he, Willis, got there and what caused his condition, being dead, were never really told only that Lloyd's wife Megda, Elizabeth Sellars, worked for Willis who was getting a little too friendly with her.With all that behind us were then shown that Robbie is on the run from his foster parents because in him playing with matches he almost set the house on fire and is afraid that his step-dad Mr. Campbell, Jack Stewart, will beat the living hell out of him when he finds out about it. From then on both Lloyd & Robbie are on the run from the police as well as Mr. Campbell until they reach this seaside town in Scotland and plan to sea-jack a boat and check or sail out to safety in Ireland. It's while on the lamb that Lloyd becomes very attached to Robbie in that he feels that he's in far more trouble then he is. Not having a home to go home to and parents to love him Lloyd who had first had little use for Robbie starts to show real affection towards the little boy.***SPOILERS*** The love and affection that Lloyd shows for Robbie really hits home when on their way to Ireland Robbie falls deathly ill because of the raw and possibly rotten eggs that Lloyd has been giving him to eat and decides to turn the boat around back to Scotland and eventually face justice in the murder of Wills for reasons were never really given by the films screenwriters. What I couldn't quite understand is why Wills, who seemed to be well off financially, was in that bombed out building in the first place? That unless if Lloyd did murder him had dragged his body there to keep the police from finding it.