Crime Street presents
The Sleeping Tiger (1954)

Director –Joseph Losey (as Victor Hanbury)
 

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Plot
Film Notes
Cast and Production Credits

The Plot

On a London street after dark, a young hoodlum attempts to rob a gentleman. Dr. Clive Esmond, however, gets the better of Frank the hood. Instead of turning him over to the police, the psychiatrist takes him on as a patient and moves him into his own home for round the clock experimental treatment. But the cerebral good doctor has a beautiful blond American wife, who has her own theories on what criminal lowlife might be good for.

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Film Notes

Cinema of Menace!

Joseph Losey always had a lot on his mind and attempted to get it all into his films. A product of leftist leanings, political theater, Freudian psychology and artistic ambition, his films could be sharply complex or self-indulgently baroque.

His best work was his collaborations with 2005 Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter - The Servant, The Accident and The Go-Between. As Pinter's plays are sometimes referred to as "The Theater of Menace," his films with Losey might be called "Cinema of Menace."

Though The Sleeping Tiger is not a Pinter piece, in fact it predates Harold's playwriting emergence by number of years, it can be looked back on as "pre-Pinteresque." It certainly holds many similarlities with the The Servant, not least of which is the presence of Dirk Bogarde in both films. On a surface level, both films concern how fragile the morals of the upper class can be when they live in close quarters with the lower class. And when the seductions of decadence and the temptations of corruption are served up on their own silver spoons, the high are unable to resist the low.

Losey Love - London Style

Though the Freudian psychology is more than just heavy handed (more like a Fistfull of Oedipuses), this seldom seen film has some very signature stylish things going for it that send it somewhere far beyond the ranks of most "B" movies.

The cinematography has all the shadows and high and low angles that not only scream darkness, but prove that someone was actually attempting to put a personal point of view on a popular entertainment. For example, Losey, famously particular about set design and props, never misses a chance to have mirrors in the background of as many frames of film he can get them in.

Then there is some fine acting to behold. Dirk Bogarde, in blue jeans before James Dean or Elvis, pours on the bad boy rebel angel without a cause. No one does decadent as well as Dirk. And it is delicious to watch cold, blond Hollywood Alexis Smith slumming and sliding down into dank and dirty desires that American movies would never let her near.

Vulgar Is As Vulgar Does

Then there is the "V" word – "Vulgar."

Over the years Joseph's Losey's work has often been derided as vulgar. But his approach of being so offensively over-the-top has over time also proved to be his greatest asset. In film after film, he piles on the visual, thematic, and emotional subtext, building crazy puzzle palaces of sexual and moral ambiguities. Along with compatriot over-the-toppers Ken Russell (Tommy, Women in Love, Valentino) and Nicolas Roeg (Performance, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth), Losey has been out of fashion and long overdue for a critical reassessement.

Black and Blue and Red All Over

In the early 1950s, Joseph Losey joined the many refugees from the United States of Joseph McCarthy. Working for substandard wages (but at least working) the expatriate director spent most of his film directing life in Europe. He directed The Sleeping Tiger under the pseudonym Victor Hanbury.

-- Ed Schneider - Alameda TV

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Cast

Production Credits

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For more on...

Joseph Losey

Harold Pinter

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