The Sleeping Tiger

A small-time thief breaks into a psychiatrist's house and is caught. Instead of handing him to the police the doctor makes an offer: he will stay in the house, be treated, and become the subject of a kind of experiment. The young man agrees. But the doctor's wife is also in the house, and she wants something else. This arrangement between three people turns into a tension in which everyone is hiding their own account. Joseph Losey directed it, though on first release the credits named the producer Victor Hanbury as director. Losey was an American blacklisted during the McCarthy period and could not put his own name on his first British film. The American leads, Alexis Smith and Alexander Knox, were also worried about their Hollywood careers. It is one of Dirk Bogarde's early parts and one of the harder examples of British noir.