I sat through an awful movie, one of four movies Joseph Losey directed in Britain either without credit or under an assumed name. It was Sleeping Tiger which was one of three movies he directed with Dirk Bogarde.
I watched it because it sounded a bit lurid. A psychology professor takes a gun away from a mugger played by Bogarde and forces him to stay at his house with his wife and servant so he can cure him of his criminal tendencies. The guy starts running around with the professor's wife.
I prefer to think that Losey, a blacklisted American director who took refuge in Britain, had no control over the content of this thing---he was just hired to direct the lousy script.
The psychotherapy scenes weren't interesting or convincing. I thought it might be a little more like Boudo Saved From Drowing but Bogarde was just a jerk until he's cured by a sudden revelation.
I assumed the doctor would kill Bogarde at the end, but the movie was more optimistic than I was about curing criminals with psychotherapy. The thing was a bit stagey most of it taking place in the house. The scenes shot out on the streets at night looked like kind of a dumpy version of a picturesque British town.
Losey's career really got going later. There were a couple of movies he made in the '70's, The Go-Between and Mr Klein, that they screened at the university when I was in high school.
The Boy with the Green Hair with Dean Stockwell in the title role helped get him targeted by HUAC and I rather liked the odd Hammer horror sci fi movie, These are the Damned (1962) with Oliver Reed as a violent Teddy Boy. I saw it in the middle of the night on TV and spent years trying to find it again.
I assume those are English musicians trying to sound American. The tables would turn in a few years and Americans would try to sound like the Beatles.
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