J Lee Thompson (1959)

Famous for Hayley Mills’s first major screen role, this crime story is disappointingly lacking in psychological and dramatic nuance compared with J Lee Thompson’s capital punishment film Yield to the Night (1956).   The twelve-year-old Mills is Gillie, the tomboyish orphan who witnesses a killing, peering through the letterbox of an apartment in the house where she lives with her aunt (Megs Jenkins).   As a child actor, Mills was a natural but she’s allowed, perhaps encouraged, to over-perform here:  her acting is often too knowing to be emotionally resonant.   (Although the story is set in Wales, Gillie has a Cockney accent – it seems for no better reason than that Mills can do one with gusto:  but it comes and goes, and adds nothing to the characterisation.)   It’s frustrating because her sullen stares into camera, and the moments when Gillie is running or far away in her own thoughts, are really expressive.  In any case, Hayley Mills gives a much better account of herself than her father, who plays the detective investigating the murder.   John Mills’s slightly indulgent playing in the early scenes with his daughter is understandable – once Superintendent Graham starts getting tough and moralistic, his performance, and the film as a whole, become meaningless.   Gillie forms so strong a bond with Bronislav (‘Broni’) Korchinsky, the young Polish seaman who committed the crime of passion that the girl saw happen, that she keeps lying to protect him.  When Graham sternly reminds her that loyalty to a ‘bad’ person is ‘wicked’, it makes no sense.   At no stage does Broni, even though he’s done a terrible thing, seem remotely wicked – but Thompson and the screenwriter John Hawkesworth (who adapted a short story by Noel Calef) seem to feel morally bound to make the punishment fit the crime.   If that’s not what Thompson has in mind – if he means us to loathe Graham’s insensitive rectitude – John Mills signally fails to help us read the director’s intentions.

This confusion between the emotional direction of the story and its formulaic and moral requirements is at the heart of Tiger Bay.  The conflict between the two imperatives might of course be fascinating but the film-makers don’t seem to be fully conscious of the opposition they’re setting up.  Besides, the plotting and details of the police investigation are, in several respects clumsily incredible:  Graham taking down the wanted man’s name over the phone without needing to check the spelling (especially unlikely given the number of remarks about ‘foreigners’ in the script); a uniformed policeman ignoring Broni as he furtively leaves a house; Gillie picking someone out on an identity parade or being allowed to run all over the ship that Broni is trying to escape on.   Horst Buchholz is over-eager and pretty obvious as Broni and the passages when he and Gillie are in hiding together and becoming friends are slightly creepy.  Still, Buchholz holds the camera and he and Hayley Mills do more than enough to win us over emotionally.

The racial diversity of Tiger Bay is used as little more than locale, although some of the look of the film is good – the streets, the kids’ games (if only the resolution of Gillie’s frustration that she can’t play with the boys because she hasn’t got a gun wasn’t resolved so over-explicitly).  The black and white photography is by Eric Cross.  The abominable music is by Laurie Johnson:  in a sequence in a playground, there’s a shot of one of those whirling things, then a shot of a child on a swing – the score supplies little aural aids to each of these images.  One of the few shared strengths of Tiger Bay and Yield to the Night is Yvonne Mitchell, who creates a remarkably complete character in her one, vivid scene as Broni’s unfaithful girlfriend, Anya, on the receiving end of four bullets from the gun that’s conveniently to hand.

27 September 2010