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!
"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!