In short: Rogue Male (1976)

1939. Driven by reasons that’ll become clear during the course of the movie, British aristocrat and sportsman Sir Robert Hunter (Peter O’Toole) nearly manages to assassinate Hitler. Instead, he falls into the hands of the Gestapo, who proceed to torture him, including pulling out his nails. They can’t just kill Hunter, though, for his uncle (Alastair Sim in full-on “demonstration why the aristocracy is a very bad idea” mode once we meet him) has a rather high position in the British government and the Nazis are still trying to draw the British on their side. So it’s best to arrange an accident to befall him.

However, Hunter manages to escape when he’s left for dead and slowly, with luck and talent, reaches British shores. That, one would assume, would be that. However, Nazi agents are still after him; worse, as his uncle explains, his own government (at this point Nazi appeaser Chamberlain still being in office) is very much willing to give him to the Nazis. So Hunter goes underground, fleeing to the countryside. But even living in an actual hole in the ground isn’t quite enough to escape his enemies, specifically another British aristocrat and sportsman, one Major Quive-Smith (John Standing), Nazi hireling.

This BBC production directed by Clive Donner adapts a novel by Geoffrey Household, a great British thriller writer who isn’t terribly known anymore, the destiny of many a writer of popular fiction. It’s a very successful film, apparently shot on something of a higher budget than most BBC productions of the time – why, even the interior scenes are shot on 16mm! – and clearly making good use of every penny, even if Wales has to stand in for Germany. Donner has a good hand for the staging of clear and effective suspense sequences that emphasise clever planning and patience over outright action for the most part and rather purposefully, but also using very simple set-ups to build tension. The scene in the subway, for example, is a prime lecture on how to make much of a simple set-up, eschewing the more involved camera work a theatrical feature would have used for clarity and focus to great effect, thereby turning the film’s nominal weaknesses into virtues.

In general, clarity and focus are some of the film’s main strengths. Its tightness really works wonders for a film in which probably not all that much happens for some contemporary tastes now; the trick is to make the things that do happen important.

O’Toole is obviously perfect casting for the role, playing Hunter as a man of his class and time, with all that entails for good and for bad, but also as a man who has developed empathy through experience unlike others of his class. The films builds a meaningful contrast between him and Quive-Smith here, a man who shares all the same telling signs of Hunter’s class, but none of the insight and empathy the other man has developed through loss and the willingness to try and understand others.


If all that doesn’t sound interesting enough, the film also features a cameo by playwright Harold Pinter as Hunter’s (Jewish) friend Saul Abrahams.