User Reviews

Very good, gritty British drama, with an excellent Dirk Bogarde as the murderer on the run who becomes a father figure to an abused child. Director Charles Crichton captures working class life and Britain, from the bleak city streets to the countryside, very well. Bogarde's scenes with the child actor Jon Whiteley are incredibly touching, and most importantly, feel inherently real. These two have such an incredible screen chemistry, that the viewer totally believes their relationship. Once again Bogarde proves himself one of the finest of all actors to grace the screen. This little British film, which obviously influenced the later, just as good "Tiger Bay" (with the child being replaced with a girl, one Hayley Mills), deserves to be better known.

***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.

Dirk Bogarde excels in this contemporary thriller from 1952, directed by Charles Crichton. The story is a simple story of two characters who are on the run from both the authorities and the world, but what impresses here is the depth of characterisation and the multi-layered perspective of a cruel world. Despite the fact that he's introduced in the act of murder, Bogarde delivers an intensely sympathetic and gruff performance that's the best I've seen from him. Matching him is an excellent Jon Whiteley as the put-upon Scottish lad who comes along for the journey. Whiteley was a natural for these parts and would play almost exactly the same role in THE WEAPON. Watch HUNTED for the gritty realism, the non-sentimentality of the premise, and the excellent performances.

Two unloved men are on the run. One is seven-year-old orphan Jon Whitely. His foster parents are cruel and he has just set the kitchen curtains on fire. He runs for cover and into the second, Dirk Bogarde, standing over the corpse of the man he has just murdered, his wife's lover.

Dirk doesn't run away. He keeps trying to get rid of the child, but he can't. He flees from London to Scotland, and Whitely follows close behind. It is in that bizarre relationship that, with few words, two portraits are drawn. Whitely is a small boy who has been mistreated by everyone, and Bogarde does not mistreat him. As for Bogarde... well, as the movie continues, we begin to see him as Whitely grown up in a world where everyone thinks of himself, and never of him: a wife who betrays him; a brother who rejects him. His performance, driven and stuck in the moment, until the very end, speaks volumes. He doesn't know either. He just has a stubborn sense of right and wrong, and he acts on it, always in the moment.

It's a great performance under the direction of Charles Crichton, far better known for his Ealing comedies, and A FISH CALLED WANDA comedies of the unloved and unnoticed who tear at the heart of people who actually bother to look at them.

Clyde Gives Bonnie Back....

"Hunted" is the Dickensian story about what would happen if a Bonnie-type character ~ in this case, a seven-year-old boy ~ ran away from his miserable foster parents & landed in with a Clyde-type character ~ in this case, a man accused of a crime & thoroughly guilty of it.

Just like the true story of Bonnie Parker & Clyde Barrow (also akin to the 1969 film about them that starred Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty), "Hunted" opens with no formalities. Robbie (played by Jon Whiteley) dashes down a street in a derelict area of London before nearly getting run over by a horse-and-buggy. A thirty-something-year-old man named Chris Lloyd (played by Sir Dirk Bogarde) saves the boy but rebukes him for his absentmindedness. In no time at all, Robbie tells Chris why he's skipped his foster parents, "I set the house on fire" Robbie says, saddened. Robbie really set the kitchen curtains of his foster parents' house aflame but that matters not. What matters is that Robbie feels he cannot go home and Chris concedes to having the boy tag along with him because Lloyd himself has no home to retreat to either.

Chris needn't explain why he hasn't a home to Robbie, as one normally would in these type of scenarios. Robbie displays the headline of the local newspaper with poker-faced apprehension: "COMPANY DIRECTOR'S BODY FOUND IN BOMBED CELLAR"

He has the usual lashing-out response that a seven-year-old boy would have upon discovering the ornery adult savior who saved him from being flattened into shish kabob is, in fact, a murderer uncaught.

Afterwards, without reservation, he and Chris embark on a hitchhiking escapade out of that decrepit little crevice of city in London and across the swampy farmlands of pastoral England all in the great video resolution of monochrome (black & white film).

Chris attempts abandoning Robbie multiple times, but eventually, the two connect over the fact that both man and boy have done something heinous in self-defense against something even more heinous. Which also explains why Robbie doesn't immediately alert the police upon realizing Chris killed someone. Robbie also has a bone to pick with Scotland Yard because he's afraid they'll escort him back kicking and screaming to his implicitly abusive foster parents.

Robbie, very similar to Dunaway's Bonnie from "Bonnie and Clyde", is an aloof boy who's smarter than others accredit him for. Where he differs from Bonnie is that while Bonnie is gregarious, theatrical, neurotic, and is much-too-aware of her sensuality, Robbie is quiet, bashful, and perceptive. He's not the kind of six/seven-year-old who one could easily delude, and that's why Chris does not delude him into thinking that somehow, Robbie has magically discovered a saint who'll make sure "nobody's gonna knock you around anymore". When Chris reassures Robbie with that sentiment (as quoted above) , he's simply reinstating a promise he pledged to Robbie earlier when Robbie leaped onto a train car in pursuit of Chris. This kind of calling-back to sentiments spoken as opposed to a sentimental tone courses throughout the arteries of "Hunted". Particularly during an intimate moment, (shot beautifully in one take), when Chris confesses to Robbie why he murdered someone by way of a bedtime story.

I won't spoil the heinous elements for you, for I want you to infer them for yourself upon watching "Hunted", but I will say that these moments of pseudo father-son bonding are affectionate, curious, and well-crafted.

Those latter three adjectives are ample words by which to laud "Hunted". Director Charles Crichton maintains the film mostly in rudimentary medium shots and pulled-in shot-reverse-shots. These are shots that are easily recognizable to every fledgling filmmaker and while I usually believe rudimentary cinematography is cheap in a film, here Crichton and his cinematographer (Eric Cross) make the correct choice.

An unadorned, low-tempo film such as "Hunted" benefits from such basic forms of cinematic communication because unadorned and low-tempo is how Chris and Robbie communicate.

At the end of the day, both man and boy are lost souls who feel like expatriates in the homes preordained for them ~ we have the seafaring sailor Chris with his narrowminded wife Magda, played by Elizabeth Sellers, pairing himself up with the fatherless arsonist Robbie clinging to nothing that reeks of his past life save a stuffed teddy bear plush toy. They can't communicate to anyone their inner grievances lest the other party uses it to incriminate them. The only people in whom Chris and Robbie can really confide are Chris and Robbie. This in turn opens a well of actual emotional complexity that screenwriter Jack Whittingham (basing "Hunted"/"The Stranger in Between" on an original story by Michael McCarthy) mines magnificently in lieu of how he lacks incorporating any maudlin schmaltz. Schmaltz can uplift a film like this but "Hunted" is not the sort of material that benefits from uplifting. Especially when it comes to its odd-couple pairing of a 31-year-old man and a 6 or 7 year old boy who is not his son.

This pseudo father-son couple not only disconcerts us viewers at first. It disconcerts the supporting cast to the point at which the police proceed chasing Chris and Robbie on ground of kidnapping since the murder is still undergoing investigation. Cops grill Magda about her missing husband, but she leaks not where Chris is.

Rather, she moans about the obstinate boredom that plagued her "while you (Chris) were away."

Robbie's foster parents Mr. And Mrs. Campbell (played by Jack Stewart and Jane Aird) moan to the police about the plague called Robbie when they're interrogated too. Mrs. Campbell blames Mr. Campbell for leaving bruises on the boy while Mr. Campbell blames the Mrs. Campbell for spoiling Robbie.

Evidently, the Campbells get the cavalry nowhere. & so continues a properly episodic tone that Whittingham and Crichton apply to "Hunted".

Chris and Robbie sleep behind overarching haystacks, hitchhike on trucks that are heading for Chris' brother Jack's house, promptly man and boy are rejected by Jack lest Jack's reputation is ruined by the fact that he's biological brothers with a felon on the lam. Even Robbie is a liability in the hesitant, temporary, fleeting, nomadic day-in day-out life that is a fugitive's. Which Robbie (with the kind of dogmatic endurance commonly found in battered, abused children) comes to terms with upon contracting pneumonia. This leaves Chris with a choice that I will not spoil to you, dear reader, lest I deceive you into thinking "Hunted" is predictable. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Nevertheless, "Hunted" is a riveting road-trip dramatic crime epic that I urge you to check out at your leisure. It was not Sir Dirk Bogarde's 1st major motion picture but since it was made outside of the manufactured, glossy Hollywood that plagues the average blockbuster or Oscar-baiting flick today, was considered to be one of Bogarde's favorites.

Agnostically I used to glance at Bogarde's films since I was not impressed by his performance as José in "The Spanish Gardener". Now, after watching "Hunted" all the way through, I am an ultra-religious Bogarde fan and do not try to dissuade me from that conviction.

Bogarde gives a career-best performance here. He could have easily slipped into the maimed "hardboiled, child-hating, lousy criminal with a heart of gold" cliché. Instead, Bogarde strips his Chris Lloyd of any hearts of gold. Chris is too self-sufficient for his own good & at one point, chides to Robbie unwholesomely: "Why'd you follow me? I told you not to follow me? Why do I gotta be stuck with you; I have my own life!"

In contrast, it is Jon Whiteley as Robbie who counteracts Chris' negligent impatience by inflating his performance with understated gravitas. Whiteley's chemistry with Bogarde carries a large part of the 2nd act and ultimately sells the climax that so could've easily slid into contrived sentimentality but instead registers sincere pathos. Sellers hasn't a lot of screen time but she makes up for it in charisma and brazenness. For some, Sellers' Magda seems to be the tried-and-true femme fatale archetype ~ witty and unwilling to compromise the people who mean the most to her and prone to hide her insecurities behind a confidently sexual musk. Magda is none of those things. Like Bogarde, Sellers plays Magda as an ornery, irresponsible negligent, but what separates Magda from Chris is that Magda hasn't even the integrity of a femme fatale because when she makes her final encounter with her husband, she nearly coaxes him to turn himself and Robbie in to the constabulary. As a consolation prize, as soon as Chris rightfully rejects Magda's coercion, she tries offering him gaudy bangles on the grounds that "they're real". However, major credit goes to Elizabeth Sellers who doesn't convert her performance into camp as maintaining a sense of sobriety is the perfect approach to this material.

Jack Stewart and Jane Aird make the perfect scandalized, self-victimizing couple of abusive parents imaginable. They don't blunder about like a Technicolor musical version of a Charles Dickens story, but rather act with the disturbingly natural narcissism that underlines Dickens' villains. Such performances are a pleasure to behold!

As are the performance by Frederick Piper and Kay Walsh as Mr. And Mrs. Sykes, married innkeepers who tuck Chris and Robbie away in their guest room for a night before discovering the next morning that they've let a target on the police's most wanted list sleep in their house with Robbie who everyone assumes was kidnapped despite knowing that Robbie joined Chris of his own accord. Piper and Walsh leave indelibly impressive scars with their performances here.

Geoffrey Keen, Leonard White, Douglas Blackwell, and Gerald Case urgently play the police detectives and deputies who hunt Chris Lloyd down throughout the film.

What a film!

Dirk Bogarde had a long and varied career as an actor. In the later years of his life, he reflected on his screen roles and said HUNTED was his personal favorite of all the motion pictures he made. It's easy to see why it was such a special experience for him.

All of Bogarde's most important scenes in the movie occur with young Jon Whiteley, who was six years old at the time. Whiteley was a novice in the moviemaking business, but he was clearly a natural and would be awarded a Juvenile Oscar in 1954.

On screen the relationship between their characters evolves considerably. At first, Bogarde is a bit rough with Whiteley (not unlike the boy's abusive adoptive father). But gradually Bogarde softens. Bogarde plays a violent killer who is on the lam from the police. He crosses paths with a lost boy (Whiteley) in the street and is moved to help him. They wind up running away together.

Nobody they meet seems to suspect them of being runaways. But things get dicey when Bogarde's picture as a wanted man makes the front page of the newspaper. They don't stay in one place very long, since Bogarde is paranoid about the police catching up.

They are two lost souls traveling the countryside together. Though they are of different ages, they develop an unusual support system for each other. Society in late 1951 when this movie was filmed, was obviously very different from society today. It would be a tough sell to make this picture now...people might assume Bogarde's character is holding on to the boy for sexual reasons. It probably wouldn't seem so innocent.

One of the main themes in HUNTED is postwar poverty. Director Charles Crichton seems to have been influenced by Italian neorealism. The story conveys a sense of gritty realism and there's very little sentimentality, except in a few key scenes. Whiteley's character doesn't smile until halfway into the movie. Then he gets sick, so his sunny disposition doesn't last.

The scenes at the end are particularly effective- the part where Bogarde decides to stop living as a fugitive, and he carries the sick boy off for help. The long tracking shot where he brings Whiteley up from a boat they've been hiding on is certainly memorable. A crowd of spectators looks on and the police show up along the docks. We know Bogarde will hand the boy over to them. We also know Bogarde will be arrested and go back to stand trial.

A few plot points are left unresolved- will the boy go back to live with his adoptive parents where he had been abused, or will he be placed in a new home? Also what will happen to Bogarde, since his problems with the law are enormous. Will he be sentenced to die? It's an interesting movie that leaves us with a lot to consider.

Mostly, it causes us to think about how two people might be able to help each other during a mutually difficult period in their lives, when everything is tumultuous and needs sorting out. They form a strong bond they will always remember.

When I sent an email to Jon Whiteley a few years ago and asked him about his movie career, I got the feeling he still thought highly of Dirk Bogarde. For a time, they had shared part of the same cinematic journey together. If you watch HUNTED and find it an interesting film, seek out THE LITTLE KIDNAPPERS (1953) which earned Whiteley his Oscar...and also take a look at THE SPANISH GARDENER (1956) since it once again reunited him with Mr. Bogarde on screen.