Jack Hawkins

  • Peter Glenville – The Prisoner (1955)

    Drama1951-1960Peter GlenvilleUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    British theatrical director Peter Glenville made his film directorial debut with 1955’s The Prisoner (Glenville had previous helmed the London stage production of this Bridget Boland play). The film is based on the real-life travails of Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty, who after suffering under Nazi persecution was imprisoned by the new Communist regime for remaining loyal to his religious convictions. Alec Guinness, his head shaved, plays an unnamed Cardinal in an unspecified Eastern European country who is clapped into jail. Here he is ordered by the politicos to issue a phony statement to his flock, one that will effectively end Catholicism in his country. Jack Hawkins plays the diabolically clever “Interrogator”, who is almost successful in convincing Guinness that his false statement will have a beneficial effect. The Prisoner fared better in its American release than it did in Europe, where it was branded both “pro-Communist” and “anti-Communist” by various single-issue pressure groups.Read More »

  • Ken Annakin – The Planter’s Wife (1952)

    1951-1960AdventureDramaKen AnnakinUnited Kingdom

    IMDB Review
    Sweet, docile little Claudette Colbert – firing a machine gun? Anything’s possible in the movies!

    Colbert and her husband live on their rubber plantation in Malaysia (back when it was Malaya) with their small son. Her husband is too absorbed in the plantation to notice her very much, and she decides that when it’s time to take their son to school in England, she will go with him and never return. But then she is unable to leave when bandits kill one of their neighbours, then tries to kill Colbert, and the whole plantation is set up in a murderous game of cat and mouse.Read More »

  • Daniel Mann – Five Finger Exercise (1962)

    1961-1970Daniel MannDramaUSA

    Plot Synopsis by Mark Deming
    A distinguished cast highlights this film adaptation of a stage drama by Peter Shaffer. Stanley Harrington (Jack Hawkins) is a self-made businessman incapable of expressing his emotions or compromising with others; his wife Louise (Rosalind Russell) imagines herself an intellectual, though her intelligence is more of an affectation than a reality. Stanley and Louise hire Walter (Maximilian Schell), a teacher from Germany, as a tutor for their two teenage children, effeminate Philip (Richard Beymer) and high-strung Pamela (Annette Gorman). Walter tries to ingratiate himself with the family, with little success; when he tries to get to know Louise better, she imagines that he’s fallen in love with her, and she’s deeply hurt when he confesses that he instead sees her as a motherly figure. Walter is eventually driven to the brink of suicide, which forces the family to reconsider their attitudes toward Walter and each other.Read More »

  • Michael Truman – Touch and Go (1955)

    1951-1960ClassicsComedyMichael TrumanUnited Kingdom

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    Plot: Touch and Go stars Jack Hawkins as the head of a British family who decides to kick over
    the traces and emigrate to Australia. No one in the family, least of all wife Margaret Johnston, is
    enthused over this move, but they prepare themselves with dignity. As the technical and legal obstacles
    preventing their move begin to mount, even Hawkins has second thoughts about hitching his star Down Under.
    Since no one behaves very believably in the film, Touch and Go rises and falls on its individual comic
    sequences, some of which are quite good. The title Touch and Go has been used so often that when the
    film was released in the US, it was retitled The Light Touch. Read More »

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