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The Gentle Gunman (Vintage Classics) [Blu-ray] [2022]

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The Gentle Gunman will be released on both Blu Ray and DVD on 7th March. Newly restored for this edition, The Gentle Gunman simply looks glorious. Deep inky contrast (the scene in the rain looks particularly impressive) combined with a beautifully crisp and sharp picture, make it seem as if the film could have been shot yesterday. Sound is likewise clean and clear. Altogether this is a beautiful restoration. Overlapping dissolves to reveal a hidden bomb, director Basil Dearden & The Third Key (1956-also reviewed) cinematographer Gordon Dines following the divide between the brothers with an excellent, ultra-stylized Film Noir atmosphere, where Dearden cuts through the crisp high contrast lighting, with jagged panning shots over rugged terrain, push-ins on… Released in 1952 and starring two of the biggest box-office British actors of the time – John Mills and Dirk Bogarde – The Gentle Gunman is about the Irish Republican Army, and more specifically the “S-Plan” campaign (the “S” stood for sabotage) that it ran on the British mainland from early 1939 until mid-1940, to try to force the government to end the partition of Ulster. The film, based on a play of the same name by the Scottish dramatist Roger MacDougall – which had already been shown on BBC Television in 1950 – is laced with moral ambiguity, though the viewer might well question just how likely it was that such feelings would exist in a real terrorist of the type shown in the film. The Gentle Gunman is a 1950 thriller play by the British writer Roger MacDougall. A former IRA gunman attempts to renounce his violent past, as he is now convinced a non-violent approach is best. Did you see them? If not, many of their locations are here on Reel Streets, and if they are not yet discovered, can you help us find them?

Points for the effort, and it’s not a disaster by any means, but it is a bit of a farce when it would have been stronger taking things more seriously. Basil Dearden enjoyed a long and successful relationship with Ealing Studios, both producing and directing many of their best-loved films of the 1940s and 50s. October 30, 2023 , Joel Fisher , No Comment Pigeon Shrine Halloween Frightfest Film Review – Maria (2023)Terry, though, is now a wanted man – wanted by his former comrades, who intend to execute him for his “treachery”: and they are led by a truly unpleasant fanatic, Shinto, played by Robert Beatty. The Sullivans’ mother also hates the IRA, since her husband and another son have already died after their involvement with the organisation. The blu-ray looks terrific. Dearden's direction is very sound and the story is dynamic. It isn't exactly the thriller I expected at first--less pressure, for example, than Odd Man Out and less poetic--but for all that, the story is wide open and resolves sensibly. There's no doubt that any Irishman would find this utter codswallop, though its message is all those English niceties of comfort, steady work, and good sense with stout courage at the heart of it. An interesting British gloss on the Irish situation of the 1940s. Sympathetic, but no more so than a lefty feels for any underprivileged young man tempted into the life of a criminal. As an Ealing film, that's what you get with a bit of roguish wit. The accents are not entirely convincing and warst from our two stars Bogarde and Mills. I do love their presence, though, Bogarde's moping and Mill's bravado. The 20th Century proved to be a tumultuous period for conflict and war in Ireland. The early part of the era saw The Easter Rising in 1916, followed several years later by the Irish Civil War. The latter part of the century was of course defined by The Troubles in Northern Ireland, which finally culminated in peace with the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. September 25, 2023 , Paul Devine , No Comment Win Delightful Animation Mavka: The Forest Song on DVD

Ealing Studios produced this interesting take on the Troubles with a handful of its most famous stars in front and behind the camera. One of the studio’s most respected directors Basil Dearden (Dead of Night, The Blue Lamp) depicts Dirk Bogarde and John Mills as brothers waging an IRA bombing campaign during WWII. Yet even with its handful of nicely staged action scenes, its focus is much more on the ideological clash between family and national identity as loyalties and beliefs ebb, flow and begin to shift as the bodies begin to pile up. The Gentle Gunman (1950)". London: British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 28 November 2021 . Retrieved 18 April 2023. Although its boss, Michael Balcon, could be a mild autocrat, Ealing Studios took a democratic approach to the content of its films. When most higher-budget British films were about royalty, the nobility, toffs or (at worst) the middle classes, Balcon’s arrival at Ealing in 1938, and the war in 1939, saw the “ordinary” man become central to the studio’s output. Toffs became confined to romantic costume dramas, such as 1948’s Saraband for Dead Lovers (about George I’s wife, and one of the studio’s least successful films), or, the following year, the magnificent Kind Hearts and Coronets, an extravaganza of such decadence and depravity that Balcon, and indeed many viewers, did not understand quite how decadent and depraved it was. The fact that, in 1952, this opens with an explicit parallel between Germany's invasive territory-grabbing in WWII and that of Britain in Ireland is quite something.The British magazine Time Out thought the film was "stiff" and "overplotted", [3] while the British Film Institute thought the film struggled to "find the right tone" and culminated with a "car-crash of an ending". [4] The New York Times thought that the film had "failed to search beneath the surface" of the screen-play and described much of the content as "superficial". [5] Quotes [ edit ] The newly restored transfer looks amazing. All the burning, powerful looks and subtle but meaningful gestures pop out of the screen. This adds amply to the essence and effect of the film compared to the older transfer I had previously seen. The Verdict

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