The Sleeping Tiger (1954)

Lack of good storyline.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

"The Sleeping Tiger" is a film so flawed by its premise that no matter how good the picture is, it is automatically cursed to be second- rate. Think about it...a thug with a gun breaks into a psychiatrist's home and the doctor then invites the criminal to live in his home! The only way this MIGHT have worked had they made there a latent homosexual undertone to all this. But there wasn't and the film often makes no sense at all!Dirk Bogarde plays the crook, Frank, and he plays him very well. This is no surprise, as Bogarde played many sociopathic creeks and played them well during this era. He does his best with the material. As for Alexis Smith, her character as the Doc's wife is terrible--and clichéd. And, the husband, played by Alexander Knox, is the worst of all...a man who makes himself a virtual eunuch in his own home! The bottom line is that while the film has its moments, the plot is simply hopeless and a couple dumb characters make it all the worse. You could do a lot better and I'd recommend you try some of Bogarde's better written sociopath films such as "Cast a Dark Shadow".

**SPOILERS** Bizarre yet interesting psycho analysis movie that's still miles ahead of similar films made around that time, 1945-54, that deals with the complexities of the human mind.In "The Sleeping Tiger" Dr. Clive Esmond, Alexander Knox, an expert at hand-to-hand combat during his time in the military disarms petty criminal Frank Clemmons, Dirk Bogarde, who attempted to mug him. Instead of having Clemmons arrested and put behind bars Dr,Esmond takes Clemmons home, making him his personal houseboy, to study and at the same time cure him of his criminal tendencies. Arrogant and unrepentant Clemmons never at first appreciates what the good doctor is doing for him. It's when he meets Doc. Esmond's wife Glenda, Alexis Smith, that something clicks in his brain that has him try to make a play for her. What's even more bizarre is that Glenda, who at first couldn't stand the sight of him, starts to slowly gravitate to and fall for the somewhat rude and violent Clemmons!Making himself at home the first person that Clemmons targets with his wrath is the house maid Sally Foster, Patricia McCarron, who ends up running for her life and away from the Esmond house after he maliciously ruins her clothes by pouring the contents of an ink bottle on them. With an enforced curfew on him by Dr. Esmond Clemmons still sneaks out at night and together with his friend Harry, Harry Towb, breaks into and robs a local jewelry store. Still breaking curfew Clemmons spends most nights, when he's supposed to be at the Esmond residence, at the anything goes Metro Club in the Soho District of London! While all this is happening Glenda starts to go bananas over the free living and fun loving, in doing his "thing" at the expense of everyone else, Clemmons where she plans to leave her husband and take off, into the wild blue yonder, with him!***SPOILERS*** Even though it didn't seem to at first Dr. Esmond's experiment on Clemmons started to gets results. Not just in Clemmons becoming a normal and productive human being but him suddenly realizing that Glenda is a far bigger fruitcake then he ever was! It's in her putting on an act of how normal and proper she was Glenda was really concealing the fact in what a very disturbed and self-destructive woman she really is.The final revelation to just how nuts Glenda was is when Clemmons, now trying to get as far away from her as possible, decided to brake up with her. This pushed the panic button in Glenda's paranoid brain who in revenge for what Clemmons did to her, dropping her like a hot potato, makes up a fake and malicious story to her husband, the good doctor, that he both beat and even tried to rape her! What Glenda didn't quite realize his that her husband was on to all all the time and used Clemmons to bring out her paranoid and insane fantasies! Which in the end backfired on him by underestimating just how crazy she really was!

A certain Victor Hanbury is credited with directing this remarkable psychological drama but that won't fool any of Joseph Losey's admirers since it shares not only thematic similarities with one of his most notable American films, THE PROWLER (1951), but was indeed the turning point of his career in many ways: blacklisted by Hollywood for his Communist leanings, Losey fled first to Italy and then to Britain, remaining in Europe for the rest of his days. THE SLEEPING TIGER also marked the start of a fruitful collaboration (resulting in five films) between Losey and star Dirk Bogarde, who here shows a definite maturity miles away from the bland matinée idol roles he typically played during this period; the film itself has an intensity not found in contemporary British cinema.Alexis Smith (terrific in one of her last starring roles) and Alexander Knox (playing his part in the Glenn Ford manner – where a quiet exterior conceals a strong personality, hence the film's title) are the married couple whose sheltered suburban lives are invaded by smart but incorrigible thug Bogarde; Knox is a psychiatrist whom the young man had tried to hold up, but has the tables turned on him and is subsequently kept on in the former's house as a 'guinea pig' – echoes of BLIND ALLEY (1939) and THE DARK PAST (1948) – where he stirs up the passionate instincts of the doctor's frustrated American wife. Needless to say, there's no happy ending for any of the characters: the climax provides plenty of fireworks and twists – with Losey's ironic symbolism being maintained till the film's very last shot. Composer Malcolm Arnold adapts his score to each of the film's moods, alternating between the sleazy and the histrionic.Unfortunately, the poor-quality Public Domain print I watched bears some evident signs of wear-and-tear as there are a handful of jarring jump-cuts throughout (resulting in a running-time of 87 minutes against the official 89); several years back, the film was released on PAL VHS but no official DVD is in sight yet in any region (a status, alas, in common with the majority of Losey's work prior to the 1960s).

Joseph Losey, working under a pseudonym after his blacklisting, didn't want to make this overbaked British melodrama. And who can blame him, given the heavy-breathing histrionics of the screenplay, a ridiculous concoction about a psychiatrist and his sexually frustrated wife harboring a hoodlum. The plot turns are unconvincing, the music hilariously overblown, and Alexander Knox, as the shrink, terminally uninteresting.What makes this mess watchable is its game imitation of American noir tropes (dark alleys, femmes fatales, car chases), and some good very early rock-and-roll/jazz in the pub sequences. Also, the film can be viewed as a warmup for the later Losey-Bogarde collaborations, which explored similar themes (guilt, moral ambiguity, the nature of evil) much more expertly.