The original 1960 film, based on the the Stephen Potter novels, and directed by Robert Hamer. It’s quite good. Alastair Sim is terrific. And he has the fuzziest ears in all of movie history. This is the story, which is not exactly like that of the Todd Phillips remake, which came out a few years ago: Henry Palfrey (played by the late Ian Carmichael, of I’m All right Jack and Lucky Jim fame) is the head of a small firm (very small, not very firm). He is a nitwit and everyone knows it but him–that is until Raymond Delauney, with whom he occasionally plays tennis, makes him all-too-aware of this fact. But the film doesn’t begin here, it begins a little later then jumps backwards. (more…)

By no means a particularly good movie, this British vigilante flick is better than the first ten minutes promises. There really is only one reason to watch it: Michael Caine (like Terrance Stamp, this is someone I will watch in even the worst movies) playing a role a lot closer to that of the cynical spy, Harry Palmer, that he played in the Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin.

The movie is set on a crumbling public housing estate in London (funding came from Britain’s National Lottery) which is portrayed as terrorized by brutal thugs. This is the worst, least realistic part of the setup and it produces some stupid scenes of hopped up “hoodies” randomly beating up and shooting passers’ by. Enter elderly widower, Harry Brown, who had some dark past in the Royal Marines, working in Northern Ireland, but who has tried to put his own violent past behind him. his wife dies and his best friend is killed by the thugs. Brown takes revenge, slowly at first, but with increasing ferocity.

Much of the movie is stupid and overwrought, but Caine does give it moments of real intensity as his face remains impassive but something seems to crumble beneath the surface. He never tries to become Charles Bronson, in fact one scene has him collapsing from his emphysema while pursuing one of the murderers. He simply plays what he is: an elderly man, with some weapons training and a sense of loss, not just of his family and friends but of an earlier, different sort of community. There are a couple of good scenes that were cut and only appear in the special features, including one in which he talks about the character of chess pieces; it has some resonance with the similar scene in the first season of The Wire. Perhaps only worthwhile as an exercise in nostalgia for early Michael Caine, but not a total waste.