Joseph Losey (1954)
The well-known names in the cast list for The Sleeping Tiger are less interesting than the unfamiliar ones on the screenplay and direction credits – Derek Frye and Victor Hanbury respectively. These are pseudonyms of the Hollywood blacklisted. The writers are actually Harold Buchman and Carl Foreman. The director is Joseph Losey, whose first British-made feature this was. While the name Derek Frye was an invention, there really was a Victor Hanbury active – or, more to the point, dormant – in the contemporary British film industry. He hadn’t (according to Wikipedia) directed a picture since 1944, although he’d produced several. Hanbury lent his name to make life easier for Losey.
The story, adapted by Buchman and Foreman from a novel by Maurice Moiseiwitsch, is bizarre enough. Psychiatrist Clive Esmond (Alexander Knox) is held up at gunpoint one night near his London home. He overpowers the gunman. Rather than press charges, Esmond invites the young recidivist criminal Frank Clemmons (Dirk Bogarde) to be a house-guest-cum-psychoanalytic-guinea-pig. In the course of his stay, Frank keeps reverting to type, making The Sleeping Tiger like a noir reworking of Boudu Saved from Drowning. Decent, dull Esmond is married to attractive, much younger Glenda (Alexis Smith), who soon falls for Frank. (Bogarde and Smith were exact contemporaries, fourteen years younger than Knox.) Even when Esmond comes upon his wife and Frank in flagrante delicto, the good doctor’s priority is still to get to the root of the childhood trauma that he thinks must have sown the seeds of Frank’s criminality.
The film arrived in cinemas just a few weeks after Doctor in the House, which made Dirk Bogarde a big popular star (in Britain). If the IMDb synopsis is to be believed, Frank Clemmons is a ‘brash young thug’. Although he’d been a villain before – notably in The Blue Lamp (1950), where he shot and killed the future Dixon of Dock Green – Bogarde is almost laughably too classy in The Sleeping Tiger. (In a few years’ time, he’d have been more convincing as the psychiatrist.) Still, his miscasting is worthwhile just for the sequence in which Frank opens up about the relationship with his tyrant father that set him on the road to a life of crime. Bogarde is exciting here: he finds it much easier to express psychic depths than to depart from received pronunciation. Nine years later in The Servant, his most successful collaboration with Losey, he managed to do both.
Fellow Canadians Alexander Knox and Alexis Smith are nothing if not complementary. Knox seems as resistant to the overheated atmosphere as Esmond is oblivious to his wife’s emotional turmoil. Alexis Smith tries to keep pace with Losey as he ratchets up the melodrama: she’s seriously overwrought. The film ends up looking misogynist to a startling degree. Frank may have had a traumatic childhood but his appalling father can’t have been much worse than the desperately demanding, hell-hath-no-furious Glenda. No wonder Frank, once Dr Esmond’s experiment is complete, decides to hand himself in to the police: anything for a quiet life. Glenda dies in a last-minute car crash. She smashes at high speed into a roadside hoarding that displays an image of a tiger (rampant rather than couchant). In retrospect, this bonkers finale feels like a freakish anticipation of the famous Esso advertising slogan (coined a few years after this film appeared) – ‘Put a tiger in your tank’.
5 March 2020
