malcolmgsw This is a truly woeful effort from Ealing.So much about it is wrong.Most of the actors are ill suited to their roles and end up speaking like Barry Fitzgerald.Characters are underwritten.John Mills part in particular.Also the action is ridiculous.IRA men are taken to serve a sentence in Belfast!When the guards discover an intruder in the docks they don't guess what he is after.John Mills is allowed on a navy ship without question and then gets away.Naturally unshown as the writer could not dream up a plausible way of showing this.Despite the fact that the 2 prisoners have escaped the prison van still shows up at the yard.Difficult to know who the studios were aiming at with this film and little surprise that it had only a short time left of its existence.

Martin Bradley The Irish 'Troubles' might seem an unlikely subject for an Ealing film of the early fifties but when you consider it's a Basil Dearden/Michael Relph movie then perhaps not, for Dearden and Relph were the team behind "Sapphire" and "Victim" which tackled racism and homosexuality at a time when such subjects were considered taboo. It's set during the Second World War and it's about the IRA doing their bit to heighten the Blitz in London and casts John Mills and Dirk Bogarde as very unlikely Irish brothers, one for the use of violence and the other against it. Bogarde, in particular, is miscast, (he never wanted to make the movie), and his attempt at an Irish accent is pretty awful but Mills, once again, proves the better actor and turns in a fairly credible performance while Dearden ensures the suspense quota remains high. An excellent supporting cast includes Jack MacGowran, Liam Redmond, Robert Beatty and Barbara Mullen. It's unlikely it will ever go down as one of the better films to deal with the Irish question but neither is it negligible and it is worth seeing.

howardmorley I could only rate this 5/10 mainly because of the atrocious casting.I do not accept Ealing Films could not cast this film in 1952 with more authentic Irish actors in the principal roles.Consider they casted these leads:John Mills, Dirk Bogarde (English) wobbly accents, Robert Beatty (Canadian) wobbly accent, Elizabeth Sellars (Scottish) wobbly accent.Ironically Eddie Byrne whom I always thought as Irish was actually born in Birmingham, England and Barbara Mullen was actually born in Massachusets, USA.A real mixed bag of actors and accents which completely destroyed the believability of this film for me.I suppose their drama academies had not taught them authentic Irish accents and had dredged every vernacular out of them in their quest for received pronunciation.The part of "The Gentle Gunman" I enjoyed most were the verbal duels of Gilbert Harding ("What's My Line 1950s BBC TV version;Face to Face with John Freeman) with the actor who played old doctor O'Loughlin (from "A Night To Remember" 1958) and a Mrs Doyle (Father Ted) type woman operating the telephone exchange at an Irish post office.Film producers have an awful tendency to romanticise IRA type figures in films.

Michael Neumann This small gem of a thriller is set in the ambiguous battleground of Northern Ireland during World War Two, where a hotheaded young Irish patriot (i.e. terrorist) learns his older and wiser brother (a disenchanted ex-IRA soldier) has been suspected by his old comrades of duplicity. It may not be a classic, but the film offers plenty of action, some unobtrusive melodrama, and a script that never strays too far from the larger issues. The optimistic ending may ring false, but it at least provides a memorable punch line, when an Englishman and his Irish companion are shown celebrating their differences with a toast. Says the Britisher: "To England, where the situation is serious but never hopeless", to which the Irishman replies: "To Ireland, where the situation is hopeless but never serious."