Several ironies are involved here not least the two irons playing heterosexual lovers, then there's the writer, Daniel Frye, who was really two other people, first Carl Foreman, who wrote the original treatment and Harold Buchman who gave it a buff job and finally there's director Victor Hanbury, in reality Joseph Losey who, like the two writers had been 'blacklisted' in the states and was thus obliged to work under a John Doe. In 1954 average filmgoers in England cared only that a given film provided ninety minutes of divertisment; terms like 'blacklist', 'HUAC', 'Hollywood Ten' 'Unfriendly Witness' and the like were never mentioned in the film magazines of the day; Picturegoer and Picture Show were little more than PR for the studios, a mixture of painless, positive reviews for even the most banal movie and studio-supplied puffs on the private lives of the stars and upcoming films so that the average film-goer would bask in the knowledge that Alexis Smith was firmly married and Dirk Bogarde a babe magnet who implicitly slept with his pick of the Rank Charm School as and when it suited him. The film itself is pure, undiluted tosh that wouldn't stand scrutiny beneath a Toc H light-bulb let alone a strong light but it is watchable even after a half century.
Review of The Sleeping Tiger
