That was an excellent one.

Sadly Over-hyped

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Through long practice, Clive Donner has mastered the art of making pictures unmistakable for anything but British television - cramped, carelessly framed shots; anachronistic hairdressing and set decoration; the cheapest possible film stock; music disinterred from a muzak burial ground; scenes every single one of which was obviously the first take; editing apparently committed with a greasy boning knife by a whimsical butcher. Yet for all its brownish greens, awkward flashbacks and 70s sideburns, the WWII thriller ROGUE MALE is that rarest of items, a badly directed good movie. It's Frederic Raphael, the most pretentiously named writer since Goldsworthy Dickinson, who bears primary responsibility for the film's success. He keeps things fairly rushing along, always ready with a clever quip for Peter O'Toole to flip from the tip of his furred tongue.Within five minutes, O'Toole at his most wan and inebriated is tortured by Michael Byrne, the same Nazi who twenty years later was hurled off a cliff by Harrison Ford. Here, he and O'Toole insult each other's public school before O'Toole is hurled off a cliff onto a shotgunned pig. Then O'Toole, probably of necessity, is allowed to abandon vertical ambulation, crawling and slithering through much of the movie. It's a good start to a really fun little spy hunter.This is the O'Toole of legend, the one who falls off stages reciting sonnets backward, the famous wastrel, the untamed actor so charming and well-equipped that even when he forgets his line, can't walk without a stagger, or drifts through entire scenes with the most bleary of stares, delivers a thoroughly entertaining and credible performance. When the Nazis stuff a dead cat into his burrow, he recites Byron to it. How many actors could pull that off, drunk or sober?Incidentally, his character's name in this film is Robert Hunter, not Thorndyke, which title IMDb curiously bestows upon him. (In the novel the character is unnamed, and in Fritz Lang's previous adaptation MAN HUNT he's Alan Thorndike with an i. Hmm.)

I wasn't expecting much, and the horrendous VHS-to-DVD transfer didn't help matters, but the close following of screenplay to novel, and the perfect casting of O'Toole as the vulnerable English aristocrat, makes this TV?!? adaptation a must see.Much of the quality and suspense of the novel comes through, and the wordiness if you will of the script gave O'Toole the freedom to express his character and the political-vs-personal tensions Household filled _Rogue Male_ with.This must have been an English production, I can't imagine an American one including the racial characterizations, 30's political details, or the quick repartee.

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.

"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!