Movie review - "The Sleeping Tiger" (1954) ** (warning: spoilers)

The first collaboration of Dirk Bogarde and Joseph Losey has interesting parallels to their later classic The Servant - again he's a mysterious, dangerous man who is invited into a household by a man of a higher social class and wrecks havoc with the man's wife. In this case the household is psychiatrist Alexander Knox and wife Alexis Smith, whose marriage is soon seen to have plenty of flaws. Bogarde and Smith have an affair and Smith goes batty.

This starts very well, with Bogarde in superb touch as a seductive crook and Smith also excellent as the housewife whose passion Bogarde unleashes by smacking around the maid and taking her to wild jazz-playing Soho nightclubs. But then it sort of runs out of ideas - there are too many investigative scenes with cops asking questions that feel repetitive.

Knox is a bit bland (he doesn't even seem to care when he catches his wife and Bogarde in a dodgy embrace); although is smugness is good, he really needs something more for us to get into this character - what sort of man allows himself to be cuckolded, then makes up fake alibis, etc. Bogarde's "I'm like this because they took my fire engine away when I was little" scene is not very convincing.

And it was annoying how at the end Knox and Bogarde gang up on Smith e.g. Bogarde dumping her, Knox pretending to shoot Bogarde (what a mind f*ck), and it's Smith who dies not Bogarde - there was an anti-female slant to Losey's work with would constantly re-emerge. It gets a bit silly and dull.