The Spanish Gardener

Adapted from the A.J. Cronin novel, the film posts a British diplomat whose marriage has collapsed to a small town on the Spanish coast. Harrington Brande keeps his son Nicholas carefully sealed off from everyone, and when the boy takes to José, the gardener, he treats it as theft. José, played by Dirk Bogarde, wants nothing and simply behaves decently, which is where all the tension comes from. Shot at Pinewood and on location north of Barcelona, the Technicolor sets the openness of the coast directly against the father’s shut-in temper. It is a quiet film about what jealousy will make a grown man do, and it turns out to be a merciless one.