Sitting Target

Harry Lomart is serving a long sentence for murder, and the one thing holding him together is that his wife Pat will be waiting when he gets out. A visit months later takes that away: Pat does not want to wait any more, there is somebody else, and she is pregnant. Harry smashes through the glass in the visiting room and goes for her before the guards pull him off. After that he has one thing in his head, and he starts planning a way out. Douglas Hickox's film comes from the hard wing of nineteen seventies British crime cinema: not glossy, but dirty and tight. Oliver Reed plays a man who gathers his rage to a single point instead of spreading it anywhere; Ian McShane is beside him and Jill St. John is the target. The film moves on the mechanics of a revenge plan, and Hickox steadily brings the audience somewhere they can no longer be sure who is in the right.