AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

TrueHello 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.

clanciai There is always something unpleasant and morbid about Joseph Losey's films as if they were innately self-destructive, you always sit waiting for the worst, and it always comes, but you never know how, and that's the worst of it.This film is slightly different from his ordinary ones, with above all an impressing camera work slanting towards almost Bergmanesque expressionism, but the dominant trait is the impressing acting by the three main characters, Alexis Smith, always beautiful and stylish, Dirk Bogarde, always slyly intelligent and unpredictable, and Alexander Knox, always on the safe and right side of reason and humanity. He is here a psychologist venturing on the interesting but risky experiment of housing a criminal (Bogarde) instead of turning him over to the police, in an effort to straighten him out. He gets straightened out but at the cost of Alexis Smith, Dr. Knox' wife, who finds her own tiger inside herself. There is more than one tiger getting roused from sleep and every day routine in this psychological thriller of mainly reasoning and experimenting - there is a gun but no bloodshed. The raw music of saxophones constantly insisting on vulgarity adds to the decadent atmosphere of human decay and perdition, like in so many of Losey's films if not all of them, but this is certainly one of his best. The Soho scenes contrast sharply against the orderly clinic and home of Dr. Knox and add some extra suggestive noir perfume to the dark drama of passion that never should have been called forth. Alexis Smith is always excellent, but I have never seen her better than here. It's a film of many raised eyebrows and some worries, but it is brilliantly realized with impressing, convincing psychology and great intelligence all the way.

evening1 This movie was incredibly compelling until the last half-hour or so. Then it all goes to hell when the Dirk Bogarde character undergoes an unconvincing transformation and the Alexis Smith character turns vampire demon.Despite the unlikely plotting, Bogarde's performance is magnificent (I've never seen him in anything in which he wasn't stellar). Ms. Stewart has an incredible face; I hadn't been aware of her previously and for the most part she's fascinating to watch.The extremely hackneyed and cowardly ending of this film was reminiscent of "Jules and Jim." The latter worked; this one fails miserably. What a cop-out.As wonderfully as this film started out, I can't recommend it.

classicsoncall I enjoyed reading the other contributor views on this board for "The Sleeping Tiger", particularly since I don't know anything about director Joseph Losey's political leanings and his team-ups with actor Dirk Bogarde. Taking the picture at face value, I had some trouble right from the get-go with Dr. Clive Esmond's (Alexander Knox) willingness to bring a common street thug into his home for the purpose of rehabilitation. Considering the doctor's age, one would surmise that he would have had enough time in his professional career to figure out that this strategy would have a predictably low success rate. After catching Frank (Bogarde) and icy veined wife Glenda (Alexis Smith) in the kitchen together, you would think he would have 'gotten it', but he still remains strangely accepting of his patient's living arrangements.Still, it's kind of fascinating to see these characters go through their paces. London's Metro Club was the perfect destination for Glenda to experience the 'other' side, enticed by Frank's admonition to "go downstairs and put on something..., a little cheaper". For someone who despised rude behavior and bad manners, Glenda willingly casts aside those reservations for a veritable walk on the wild side because of her boring and stuffy marriage to Clive. All fairly predictable.Actually it's those Metro Club scenes that sparked the most interest for me, a jazzy precursor to the decade later birth of the British sound. You have to keep an eye on some of the dance partners who appear downright goofy, and was it just me, or did Frank's chummy squeeze from the Metro wear the same dress on three different occasions. Just an observation.Well even if the story stretches credibility to the breaking point, it's bound to hold your interest in a train wreck sort of way. I really had to groan when the finale brought the sleeping tiger connection to the title in a visually jarring way with the crash through that road sign. Does anyone have ANY idea what that sign was all about?

bmacv A more apt title would have been The Sleeping Tigress, for it's Alexis Smith's performance that holds this movie together and lends it erotic friction. Despite her old-money looks and regal carriage, Smith numbered among the many talents which Hollywood mis- and under- used. She claimed attention in two late-forties Bogart vehicles, Conflict (where she was good) and The Two Mrs. Carrolls (in which she was even better, and held her own against Barbara Stanwyck). But most of her movie career consisted of mediocre roles – the ones the star actresses turned down or had to refuse owing to other commitments. (It wasn't until Stephen Sondheim's Follies on Broadway in the ‘70s that her own star shone).In this film from Joseph Losey's English exile following the Hollywood witch hunt, she plays the bored wife of psychotherapist Alexander Knox (and with him pottering around the house, who wouldn't be bored?). Bleeding-heart Knox takes a troubled young man with a prison record (Dirk Bogarde) under his roof in hopes of performing a therapeutic Pygmalion job on him. At first Smith acts snooty, then grows intrigued, and finally throws herself at Bogarde with pent-up abandon. Comes the crunch as Knox, in a three-minute Freudian breakthrough reminiscent of Lee J. Cobb's instant rehabilitation of William Holden in The Dark Past, turns the lying, thieving, abusive Bogarde into a contrite milquetoast. When Bogarde then bids her farewell, Smith careens into dementia every bit as swiftly as Bogarde was healed and feigns an assault in hopes that Knox will defend her `honor' with that gun every therapist keeps in his desk drawer....It's a lame story that might have been more convincing in an American context; the London setting and British conventions (in particular Knox's) stifle it. Bogarde started out playing this sort of charming wrong'un but isn't especially memorable here (except for his towering pompadour that must have been borrowed from Mario Lanza). But Smith's feral feline makes The Sleeping Tiger worth the ticket price.