Watch The Sleeping Tiger For Free

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Several ironies are involved here not least the two irons playing heterosexual lovers, then there's the writer, Daniel Frye, who was really two other people, first Carl Foreman, who wrote the original treatment and Harold Buchman who gave it a buff job and finally there's director Victor Hanbury, in reality Joseph Losey who, like the two writers had been 'blacklisted' in the states and was thus obliged to work under a John Doe. In 1954 average filmgoers in England cared only that a given film provided ninety minutes of divertisment; terms like 'blacklist', 'HUAC', 'Hollywood Ten' 'Unfriendly Witness' and the like were never mentioned in the film magazines of the day; Picturegoer and Picture Show were little more than PR for the studios, a mixture of painless, positive reviews for even the most banal movie and studio-supplied puffs on the private lives of the stars and upcoming films so that the average film-goer would bask in the knowledge that Alexis Smith was firmly married and Dirk Bogarde a babe magnet who implicitly slept with his pick of the Rank Charm School as and when it suited him. The film itself is pure, undiluted tosh that wouldn't stand scrutiny beneath a Toc H light-bulb let alone a strong light but it is watchable even after a half century.

At the time ,like so many others such as Dalton Trumbo,Joseph Losey used to work under pseudos because of his commie friends."The sleeping tiger" predates permanent features in the director's work:-the intruder ,be it a servant "(eponymous movie) ,a licentious gypsy ("the gypsy and the gentleman" ),some kind of doppelganger ("Monsieur Klein" ,perhaps his masterpiece), a mysterious girl ("secret ceremony"),who makes the place his very own ,physically ("The servant" ) or mentally ('Monsieur Klein" ).Dirk Bogarde is fascinating in his part of a young offender :his acting is so subtle we do not know when the movie ends whether he is a victim or a perverse person,probably both.-the depiction of the decay of a milieu the intruder will destroy : the old aristocracy in "the gypsy and the gentleman" ,the bourgeoisie in "the servant" the world of the war profiteers in " Monsieur Klein" . When Alexis Smith tells her husband's guinea pig that she got a raw deal too when she was a child but she made her way of life just the same ,the guy knows better :"because you think you are happy now?"A shrink wants to study a case of delinquency and wakens the sleeping tiger...which is perhaps not the one you are thinking of.Superlative performances by the three leads.

Dirk Bogarde attempts to mug Alexander Knox at gunpoint in a dark London street. Knox overcomes him by twisting his arm. Next, Alexis Smith, Knox's wife, comes home from a trip to Paris, sees Bogarde in her house, assumes he is one of her psychiatrist husband's patients, but is told that he is a criminal who is living under her roof for six months as an experiment in criminal rehabilitation which her husband is carrying out as a humane alternative to sending the young man to jail. She accepts the arrangement with barely a shrug. Bogarde immediately proceeds to verbally and physically abuse the house maid and act rudely toward Smith. Yet for some reason she is attracted to him and soon they are having a hot affair under the husband's nose. And on and on it goes. One startling development after another. There are elements of the overly simplistic psychiatric rehab genre reminiscent of Hollywood classics like Now, Voyager and Spellbound but with a more realistic look and feel. The music is intense and draws attention to itself, from the cacophonous noise that Smith listens to on her home record player to the sizzling live jazz at the Soho dive where she goes to loosen up with her secret lover. Bogarde is supposed to be a low-life criminal but his polished accent and genteel mannerisms seem thoroughly middle-class and this is never explained. Alexander Knox seems made of wood yet is somehow believable as the kind of intellectually preoccupied and unflappable person who just might come up with the idea of inviting a mugger into his home as an eccentric form of research. And Smith, icily self-contained at the beginning, gradually gets a chance to do some dynamic emoting. She's very good in this. The title of the film symbolizes the wild impulses that sleep within us, waiting to be awakened. From the 2007 vantage point there are no important or original social or intellectual insights here but the way the film is edited, photographed and scored are deliberately jarring without distracting from the film's intent. Losey wants to shake us up and he succeeds.

It's just a bit too much. The good doctor is attacked at gunpoint. He disarms the bad guy, then brings him home to dinner, where his high strung wife spars with the guy. Of course, the two eventually begin a movie long tryst. Dirk Bogarde is a bad boy who is a bundle of anger. He usually gets what he wants but carries more baggage than a porter at an airport. Alexis Smith is the femme fatale. She is older and bored with her psychologist husband, who is determined to resurrect the lad. He is willing to allow this man to do whatever he wants: bringing women to the house, bossing around the help, robbing jewelry stores and businesses. He is pursued by a cop who is on to him but has respect for the doctor and backs off on an arrest. It's hard to believe that this man should give a rip about Bogarde, but somehow he's willing to withdraw. The weakest part of the movie is when it all falls into place. It's so pat. A contemporary film would have built the house a card at a time; this happens in milliseconds. Then we have the denouement which I will not spoil. Let me just say it was a disappointment. The movie is visually sharp and the acting is pretty good. I never really like Alexis Smith much and she is a little grating here. Still, it's a decent performance and the subject is a little ahead of its time.