The Limping Man (1953)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Watch the very beginning carefully. Particularly the bit about the man behind borrowing the in-flight magazine it is a very important part of the script that most reviewers seem to have missed. The end will then make sense. The atmosphere of the film is excellent, particularly if you lived in London during the 1950s. PS: remember that when you dream anything can happen.

Yeah, i know it's a bad pun, but the only fitting description for this bland offering. The entire pace is snail-like, every scene is d-r-a-g-g-e-d out until every semblance of life or any possible tension are completely eradicated and everyone talks as if they graduated from Oxford, don't you know. Even Lloyd Bridges, usually a natural for a crime movie, is completely wasted here. And the ending.....i don't even want to talk about it! Too painful.....Hard to believe that Cy Enfield, who made the bleak and chilling film noir Try And Catch Me, was involved with this dreary excuse for a thriller. Only recommended to insomniacs.

There is a strict rule with IMDb reviews not to reveal the ending, so that shall remain undescribed. Up until that point, this is a very solid post-War British noir. American actor Lloyd Bridges plays a former American army captain who returns to England six years after the end of the War to renew a romance with his old flame, played by Moira Lister. She has become involved with a petty criminal and has been blackmailed by him when she tried to break off with him a year earlier. There are some good atmospheric shots down along the Thames in the East End of London at now-vanished riverside locations; it is ironical that much of what survived the German bombing has been destroyed in the past twenty years by developers, and the only way to see it now is in old movies like this one. Rachel Roberts, in her second film, plays a barmaid at the Spread Eagle pub in the East End. She was later to marry Rex Harrison, and she became a favourite British film actress in the 1960s, her most famous role being in 'This Sporting Life' (1963). She committed suicide in 1980 at the age of only 53. The 'limping man' of the title is a mysterious limping sniper who assassinates Lister's man friend on the runway at London airport, just as Bridges turns and asks him for a light for his cigarette. The police eventually discover the coincidence of Bridges being present at the murder of the man who had been involved with Lister, whom Bridges then visits, so that it all looks like a complicated conspiracy. But Bridges, like all square-jawed American heroes, is innocent, of course. However, what is Moira Lister's role in all of this? And why does she act so strange? What is really going on? It is a really good yarn, but then, as I have already pointed out and as other reviewers have also loudly complained, there is an absurd ending which infuriates the viewer, which is why so many reviewers have been highly upset. If you can brace yourself for that disappointment, the film is well worth watching.

Neither this nor Wikipedia mention that there was a 1937 film called "The Limping Man". It was the first shown in Lyme Regis's Regent cinema, opened in that year, and the story is that the mayor of the town, who did the opening, Will Emmett, happened to have a limp. The film was shown again in this historic Art Deco cinema (Lyme is said to be the smallest town in England, or possibly Britain, to have a cinema) this Oct. 12, the 70th anniversary - free, with lavish refreshments and firework display provided by the management - a wonderful occasion. That was why I looked for "The Limping Man" in Wikipedia and to my surprise found only this later film. Can anyone give further information about the 1937 film? It was a thriller with a plot too involved for me to follow in all details! Guy Ottewell