Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

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.

writers_reign ... would have been a more appropriate title for this dire effort in which even genuine Irishmen like Joseph Tomelty contrive to sound 'stage' oirish and the majority of the cast including the two leads are from Canada, Scotland, USA and England. In 1952 the IRA were relatively 'quiet' so it's difficult to know exactly who the film was targeting. Bogarde and Mills are about as convincing as Irishmen as Morecambe and Wise would convince as Latvians and as for accents Arthur Mullard could get closer to Noel Coward than they do to Barry Fitzgerald. Elizabeth Sellers was a fine actress on both stage and screen and this has to be without doubt the worst project in either medium with which she was ever associated. Should it ever be remade the only possible title would be Carry On Freedom Fighting.

Billy Pilgrim Two reasons for picking it up, Gilbert Harding in a film (my only knowledge of him was Whats my line and the Face to Face), and an Ealing film.I had known the IRA had bombed London in the war, and it was an interesting take on the story. The IRA cell get sprung (but are chased by the police in an unresolved plot end) but for the time it is even handed. I cant imagine Hollywood making a film that has sympathetic Al Qaeda characters.Yes it is wooden acting, but it passed an evening, I also picked up two Will Hay Ealing films at the same time, which I have yet to watch. The connection being that Oh Mr Porter! is a film about IRA gunrunning.

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.