Hunted

I watched The Pemini Organisation short film which is only 42 minutes but very good of Edward Woodward and also June Ritchie. It is rather splendid but far too wordy for such a short movie and there is not really any real action. Woodward made 100 films and TV although a lot of it was TV he did manage to make The Wicker Man (1973) and more recently Hot Fuzz (2007). Peter Crane directed and I wonder if this performance led to his casting in Wicker Man. June Ritchie made a few films was mainly on TV but she did make the rather splendid, A Kind of Loving (1962). I can't say that this is fantastic but is rather well done but maybe it would have been better as a play.

This very-little-seen British short film about a gunman and the real-estate agent he takes hostage feels a lot more like a 40-minute TV 'play for today' from the seventies than an actual motion picture, and I'm not sure where it was shown when first released. Apparently it was made on a budget of only one thousand pounds, in a few days in a single room: the photography is dull and unremarkable, and there's little action, so everything rests upon the writing and performances of the cast of two.

June Ritchie is perfectly adequate as the terrified estate agent but Edward Woodward raises his role as the gunman to a much higher level, with presence and detail in every moment, and the film's success rests almost entirely on his shoulders, being almost one long soliloquy. The story itself is fairly routine and predictable, but it slots each new piece of plot development into play in ways that keep the tension building and the momentum moving forwards, and never gets boring.

"Hunted" doesn't do anything well enough to make it a classic, but as a largely lost short film from the past, made for practically nothing and then forgotten for 50 years, it's a nice thing to discover.

6¾/10.