The Pursuers

Simple plot, ok acting. More like a television drama than a film. I guess the type of film that made up the bill at cinemas before television really took over. Nothing special.

A group of concentration camp survivors get together to track down surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust. Their target for this movie is the commandant of of a concentration camp, mousy little Cyril Shaps. He gets wind of this and makes a run for it, but they know the name he has been living under. He takes refuge with Susan Denny, a club singer who can get him a fake passport. She is a concentration camp survivor.

Those ironies aside this turns into a generic chase drama. I find myself caught between thinking it should be something more, and the thought that the master thought is Hannah Arendt's reporting on Eichmann's trial: she found him rather ordinary, and offered the thought that he was an example of the banality of evil, when people don't do things out of some grand conviction or massive flaw of character, but because doing the job well on its own terms offered him a chance at advancement in the bureaucracy.

Director Geoffrey Grayson had a career in B pictures and television -- he also directed four episodes of the TV series THE PURSUERS, in which Louis Hayward starred as a police inspector with a police dog. He didn't direct any A pictures, and had no noticeable style. I am caught between thinking that this is another passable thriller, and the choices are deliberate and effective. Perhaps that's why he got the job directing this.

This has something of a television episode look to it, but it's still quite an engaging thriller that follows the efforts of "David" (a rather wooden Francis Matthews) to track down a former Nazi living in London. "Luther" (Cyril Shaps) is living quietly and successfully when he discovers that he is in the firing line. He concludes that a friendship with a Jewish lady might help divert suspicion, so alights on holocaust survivor "Jenny" (Susan Denny) but will this prove sufficient to keep him safe? Will she be duped too? There is never any jeopardy as to the result with this, and the production is rather stage-bound and basic, but the story is quite well written and Shaps - as his character begins to succumb to panic and desperation - is quite effective before a rather rushed denouement. Fans of the BBC wartime sitcom "'Allo 'Allo" might spot Richard Marner in one of his early roles here too.

While the film start with noble Intentions, lest we forget the nazi horrors of WW2, the delivery is pedestrian. The soundtrack is strangely intrusive and the plot ever so slightly bon-sensical.

I came across this British Thriller for the first time this week. This is an atmospheric film that follows the hunt for a nazi concentration camp commandant in post war London. Good acting, excellent script. Well worth a view