Save your money for something good and enjoyable

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The Irish 'Troubles' might seem an unlikely subject for an Ealing film of the early fifties but when you consider it's a Basil Dearden/Michael Relph movie then perhaps not, for Dearden and Relph were the team behind "Sapphire" and "Victim" which tackled racism and homosexuality at a time when such subjects were considered taboo. It's set during the Second World War and it's about the IRA doing their bit to heighten the Blitz in London and casts John Mills and Dirk Bogarde as very unlikely Irish brothers, one for the use of violence and the other against it. Bogarde, in particular, is miscast, (he never wanted to make the movie), and his attempt at an Irish accent is pretty awful but Mills, once again, proves the better actor and turns in a fairly credible performance while Dearden ensures the suspense quota remains high. An excellent supporting cast includes Jack MacGowran, Liam Redmond, Robert Beatty and Barbara Mullen. It's unlikely it will ever go down as one of the better films to deal with the Irish question but neither is it negligible and it is worth seeing.

Directed by Basil Dearden and adapted to screenplay from his own play by Roger MacDougal, The Gentle Gunman finds John Mills and Dirk Bogarde as brothers in the IRA circa 1941. Matt (Bogarde) is the young and hungry in the name of the cause brother, Terence (Mills) has grown tired of the violence and questions the IRA's methods. This puts a strain on their relationship, whilst it also puts Terence on a collision course with the IRA superiors who brand him as a traitor.The Irish Troubles has never been an easy subject to broach in movies, the political stand point of the film makers invariably leaning towards bias. Whilst critics and reviewers have to battle with their own convictions when trying to stay firmly on the fence. The Gentle Gunman is an attempt at being an anti violence movie, one with a "gentle" pro British slant from that most British of film studios, Ealing. Unfortunately it's tonally all over the place, awash with a mixed bunch of characters that range from apparent comic relief, to rabid Irish terrorists and a town crier like British bigot. Things are further put into the realm of the unbelievable by Mills and Bogarde trying to hold down Irish accents, a shame because without the fluctuation of the vocal chords the performances are rather good.It's also a bit too stagey and the pace often drags itself into a stupor, making the adequate action scenes act more as a merciful release than anything truly exciting. On the plus side the film looks amazing at times, with Gordon Dines (The Blue Lamp) on cinematography dealing firmly in film noir filters. Which goes some way to explain how the film has come to be in a couple of reference books about British noir. But really it's a marginal entry and all told it's just a routine drama from a Studio who were much better in other genre spheres. 6/10

Two reasons for picking it up, Gilbert Harding in a film (my only knowledge of him was Whats my line and the Face to Face), and an Ealing film.I had known the IRA had bombed London in the war, and it was an interesting take on the story. The IRA cell get sprung (but are chased by the police in an unresolved plot end) but for the time it is even handed. I cant imagine Hollywood making a film that has sympathetic Al Qaeda characters.Yes it is wooden acting, but it passed an evening, I also picked up two Will Hay Ealing films at the same time, which I have yet to watch. The connection being that Oh Mr Porter! is a film about IRA gunrunning.

As fate would have it, I bought a low price DVD with this movie shortly before the bomb attacks on the London underground on July 7th, 2005. I suppose the story is based on real facts. Members of the IRA planted bombs in London's underground system during WW II. This is what happens in the first part of this movie anyway, and an amazing amount of footage seems to have been shot on real locations. Dirk Bogarde plays the young Irishman who deposits the suitcase with the time bomb on a station platform full with families and children who are bedding down for a night during the Blitz, John Mills is his older brother, also a member of the terrorist gang but beset by moral qualms. He follows the Bogarde character and manages to throw the bomb into the tunnel just before it explodes.Basically this is a story about the questioning of causes and of the justification of terrorist acts, specially in relation to the situation in Northern Ireland. In this aspect it is not unlike Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, made a few years earlier. The main character takes a critical view of the actions of the terrorists who in turn suspect him of being a traitor (not without reason). The action soon moves to an isolated road house on the Green Island, the base of the gang, and the point is clearly made, that all the actions of the terrorist are senseless and just cause harm to many innocent people without achieving anything but generating more suffering and hate.What is really interesting for a viewer of our days about this movie is how the issue of terrorism is treated. The terrorists are basically presented as misguided dimwits who will never be able to shake the system. Compared with how terrorism is regarded today this treatment struck me as being a very mild and strangely relaxed view of people ready to commit atrocities. But then I came to understand that even terrorism and its impact have to be relativised. Compared with the surface bombings by German planes during the Blitz (a memory certainly still very fresh in 1952), the damages caused by a group of terrorists must have seemed very limited indeed.