Rogue Male (1977)

The Worst Film Ever

Strong and Moving!

best movie i've ever seen.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Just few hours ago I saw for the first time this film and I am very impressed. So sad but I never read the book - the plot is so strange but Peter O'Toole is fantastic. For me especially worthy was seeing Old England and unspoiled countryside, Holborn tube station are remarkable - extra points for refreshing my memories. The idea of tandem bike also unusual. Some week points of the story is that being captured by Gestapo and killed by throwing from the cliffs our hero is ... alive. In Poland the movie is available on DVD.Is somebody who knows what kind of song was at the party sung? It's high time for looking for the book and red it.

I have read the book, and it is still, rather surprisingly, not as well known as some of the lesser output of Alastair MacLean or Hammond Innes, for example, despite its being of the very highest order.This adaptation does slightly change the plot but not to the detriment of the pace or the characterisation. This is not a jolly hockeysticks pre-War John Buchan world that these characters inhabit. The protagonist, never named in the novel, is emotionally stunted by virtue of his aristocratic upbringing and the grieving process for his one true love, whom we can guess at being either a Czech, or a Pole from Danzig/Memel. In a gesture of futile resistance the lord decides to hunt down the great dictator, in a spirit of cold vengeance and sporting curiosity. He is caught and tortured and having expended much inexplicable violence upon him the Gestapo decide to fake his death as a fall from a cliff in order to explain his injuries, having satisfied themselves that his actions were not instigated by the British government. He survives this ill use and then begins one of the most stirring manhunts in literature as he attempts to return to England without embarrassing his former circles.However, when he returns to England he finds that not all is well back in the sceptred isle.......O' Toole is on fabulous form. The lead villain is all you would expect from a Fascist sympathiser, polished, virile and an emetic upon right-thinking people. the celebration of countryside and sport is not lost upon the director as the motor for the political beliefs espoused by both sides as Milord strives to survive and the German Foreign Service seek to make political capital out of his predicament once they have his admission of acting under orders wrung out of him. It is a beautifully paced evocation of a rustic idyll that no longer exists as a result of the chancre, which it, itself, has spawned.

This is a faithful adaptation of the book by Geoffrey Household. It was made in 1941 as Man Hunt, directed by Fritz Lang. That was also a good film, particularly the George Sanders character, but in no ways is it as good as Rogue Male. This was a TV movie, and the color has faded over the years, but it is extremely provocative of the country in south England. I give it a 9.

"Rogue Male" is Geoffrey Household's finest thriller, and has long been one of my favorite books. I only discovered the existence of the film recently, and, sold by the screenwriter, director and cast listings, bought it sight-unseen, which I NEVER do. I was not disappointed. Cuts and changes were made, of course, the vast majority thoroughly justifiable. One or two others, while perhaps not strictly necessary, did no harm at all. The result was complete justice to the novel and a fine film!