The Gentle Gunman (Preview)
Reviewed by Darragh O’Donghue

The Gentle Gunman begins with two sites in Ireland, only a few miles apart, but separated by a contested border: a garage in the Irish Free State, and a doctor’s surgery in Northern Ireland. Despite their superficial differences, both sites are prisons, ideologically, and, by the end of the film, literally. As so often in contemporary fiction about Ireland, the only way for the young to survive is to leave.

The opening credits play over Fagans, the dilapidated garage. This is the base of operations for what is left of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The film, made in 1952, is set in 1941, during World War II, when the Free State maintained a precarious neutrality, and London, Coventry, Birmingham, Belfast, and other industrial cities underwent the devastating German bombing campaign known as the Blitz.

The heroic Irish revolutionary period of 1913–23 had long passed by 1941, and the garage, a dismal place crammed with things that no longer work and that its inhabitants refuse to fix, is an appropriate front for a moribund organization. In the South, the dwindling IRA were treated, at best, as cranks, and, at worst, as criminals to be interned without trial, with five leaders being executed during the war, or “The Emergency,” as it was called. After the economic war with Britain in the 1930s, the Free State had more to worry about than nationalist aspirations.

As a world war loomed toward the end of the decade, the IRA took inspiration from the last conflict—with the famous slogan “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity”—and began a terrorist bombing campaign in England. Amidst the carnage being wreaked by Nazi Germany, an industrial giant on a war footing, the IRA’s bombings were little more than an inconvenience. This campaign is not well-known in Ireland and has not entered the British folk memory of the war, unlike the “spivs” or black marketeers featured in countless films, TV shows, and books.

The film’s IRA leader Shinto (Robert Beatty) is like a spider spinning ever more elaborate webs. Shinto never leaves the two-mile radius of the film’s prime settings, but he sets in motion the main set pieces in London and Belfast. His odd mixture of passivity and activity characterizes the film itself, which alternates between long stagey interior scenes wherein characters argue ideological positions like a Shavian play of ideas, and dynamic set pieces of suspense and staccato action, often shot on location. This wonky structure is the result of Roger MacDougall opening out his source play, presented in London in 1950, and televised by the BBC during its run (no recording appears to survive). The play is confined to the sites of the doctor’s office and the garage. The action takes place off stage, the outcomes of which are eagerly awaited by characters via the telephone that becomes a key prop in the narrative.

Adaptations of theater works often suffer when they are “opened out,” but the best sequences of The Gentle Gunman are easily the set pieces invented by MacDougall and director Basil Dearden for the film. The first follows the induction of callow Matt Sullivan (Dirk Bogarde) into the realities of IRA membership—depending on drunken and volatile associates, planting bombs in crowded public spaces, fleeing from the authorities in a city effectively under curfew. Despite the top billing of John Mills as Terence, a former IRA gunman, Matt is the film’s focus. He is the only character to change during the film (Mills’s character underwent his “Road to Damascus” conversion before the film opens), and he is the character others try to persuade or tempt with their own worldviews. Matt is often associated with children and was perhaps named after the evangelist who reported Christ’s appeal, “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me.” In the film’s two bombing sequences (the second involves grenades and the abortive rescue of prisoners from a police van in a Belfast residential area), it is the very real threat to children that causes his ideological certainties to falter. Matt is consistently torn between the demands of father figures—his elder brother Terence, Shinto, and Dr. Brannigan (Joseph Tomelty). It is his repeated dishonesty to the film’s sole mother (Barbara Mullen) and guilt over his part in her son’s death that ultimately proves decisive in his final transformation…

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Darragh O’Donoghue, a Cineaste Contributing Writer, is an archivist at Tate Britain in London.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 1