Charles Crichton (1952)
A young boy stumbles into a murder scene, and the arms of the killer. The man goes on the run with the boy who, it transpires, has no wish to return to the house he shared with abusive adoptive parents. Hunted’s premise is good, but this British drama is afflicted with a shallow script and careless direction. It’s also hamstrung by the early post-war English class system – to be more precise, by British cinema’s version of it.
Wikipedia’s plot synopsis for Hunted gives the impression that the man, Chris Lloyd (Dirk Bogarde), wants from the start to disencumber himself from seven-year-old Robbie (Jon Whiteley), but that’s not the case. At least, it’s not something that Charles Crichton makes clear for quite some time, though it’s even less clear why Chris would abduct the boy. He does try using Robbie to gain access to his flat to pick up cash that Chris badly needs; that doesn’t work, though, and Chris ends up getting into the flat himself, under cover of darkness. The confrontation there with his wife, Magda (Elizabeth Sellars), reveals that she’d been having an affair – while Chris, a sailor, was away at sea – with the wealthy man for whom she worked. This is also the man that Chris has killed.
This was far from Dirk Bogarde’s first film or leading role, but his breakthrough appearance had been as a homicidal hoodlum of the London streets in Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp (1950), so it’s not as if he couldn’t manage to sound Cockney. As Chris Lloyd, Bogarde uses a light London accent at the start – just enough, it seems, to remind you that he’s a criminal. Once it emerges that Chris is a wronged husband, Charles Crichton seems to decide it’s OK for him to sound better class, and Bogarde abandons Cockney entirely. This comes as a relief to Dirk Bogarde fans like me as well as to the actor himself. Bogarde isn’t good at all in Hunted‘s early stages, where one of his enduring weak spots – an inability to convince when he raises his voice in anger – is repeatedly exposed. Whenever Chris yells at or manhandles Robbie, Bogarde registers only discomfort in the role: if he were inside his character, he’d be able to convey Chris’s panicky urgency through means other than awkwardly shouting at or shaking the child.
Things improve once fugitive Chris, with Robbie in tow, heads out of London. They hitch a lift north and a fragile bond between the pair starts to develop. Chris gets them bed and board for one night with Mrs Sykes (Kay Walsh) and her husband (Frederick Piper), who rent out a room in their house. When Robbie asks for a bedtime story, the tale that Chris concocts gradually turns to regretful autobiography. Dirk Bogarde manages this beautifully, even if it’s too sentimental that the sad story, rather than puzzling the little boy, brings a tear to Robbie’s eye. While Charles Crichton is definite at moments like this, he under-directs Jon Whiteley in much of what’s gone before. Robbie had inadvertently started a minor fire in the home of his adoptive parents (Jane Aird and Jack Stewart) and, terrified of the consequences, fled the place. If he’s scared of physical abuse, it makes no sense that Robbie hardly ever flinches when Chris treats him roughly.
The weak direction he’s given is more exasperating because blonde-haired Jon Whiteley is a winning young performer. His movement and delivery are genuinely eccentric, and Robbie’s penetrating gaze is quite something – discomfiting Chris, magnetising the camera. He and Dirk Bogarde would share the screen again in Philip Leacock’s The Spanish Gardener (1956), but it’s not just hindsight that suggests they got on well: as Hunted progresses, you sense the easy rapport between them. Unfortunately, the narrative (Jack Whittingham wrote the screenplay, based on an idea by Michael McCarthy) is often baffling in the later stages, as Chris and Robbie continue an arduous journey towards the home of Jack Lloyd (Julian Somers), Chris’s estranged brother. Jack lives at the top of a windswept Scottish ben (talk about wuthering heights). When the exhausted travellers arrive, he seems cautiously welcoming and cooks them a generously hearty supper – only then to announce that he can’t take the risk of harbouring his criminal brother or Robbie, even overnight.
They eventually reach a fishing port, where Chris steals a boat and heads for Ireland. Robbie falls unconscious while they’re at sea, Chris turns the boat round and returns to shore to get medical help. He knows the police are waiting for him on the quayside. The finale is cursory and Crichton’s direction of it perfunctory, to put it mildly. There’s no explanation for Robbie’s illness – in fact, it’s not even clear that he’s still alive. All that matters is that Chris must face justice and that he does so through an altruistic deed. When the stolen boat sets sail, the boat owner’s son (Ian Hunter, who unsurprisingly never acted again) runs to the nearby pub to alert his father. The latter, sitting at the bar, shows not the slightest interest in the theft of his boat. Kay Walsh is fine as the decent, increasingly suspicious Mrs Sykes; back in London, dependable Geoffrey Keen does a good job of playing the police detective investigating the killing. But Elizabeth Sellars is awful as Chris’s adulterous wife. Even more than their male counterparts, British actresses of the era were required to operate according to strict class rules (especially by the Rank Organisation, which was behind this film). Sellars’ Magda Lloyd is far too upmarket. This obscures the script’s implication that she was unfaithful because she was needy – because her boss could offer material comforts that her husband couldn’t.
Hunted has been termed a British noir. It goes almost without saying that it was shot in black and white (by Eric Cross) and there’s no doubt the location shooting in contemporary London is one of its strengths – from the bombed-out cellar where Robbie first bumps into Chris, to the well-staged rooftop sequence that sees Chris breaking into his own home. For the most part, though, Crichton’s direction does for Hunted. I don’t really understand his cachet in British cinema. I like Dance Hall (1950), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) – which were Hunted’s immediate predecessors – and The Divided Heart (1954). Otherwise, from his ‘Golfer’s Story’ segment of Dead of Night (1945), by far the film’s weakest section, to his celebrated comeback with A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Charles Crichton seems to me overrated.
2 May 2026
