Cinema: A Cat with Character

The cat-burglar movie has 999 lives. And for good reason: the suspense of the well-planned caper, the guaranteed palm-sweating factor in window-ledge gymnastics, the romantic appeal of the Lone Wolf against Society. He Who Rides a Tiger is a low-budget British import that delivers all these with a handsome bonus as well—some real characters worth caring about.

The cat in question (Tom Bell) is more than just lean and good looking and a whiz at going up and down drainpipes. He suffers and feels for the sufferings of others: the lonely misery of a middle-aged slattern whose husband is doing time, the agony of a vixen caught in a trap. His girl (Judi Dench) is really no bird for a burglar. She is a slightly scruffy but sensitive young woman who is doing her best to raise a five-year-old illegitimate son by teaching art in the orphanage where she boards him and by selling encyclopedias on the side.

These two people are so solidly realized that the conventions of the crime thriller—careening cars, daring acrobatics, the inexorable dragnet—are all but incidental. The film’s most heart-stopping sequence, in fact, is the hero’s climb to the roof of the orphanage to retrieve a lost ball. This is only one of the many small human truths that Director Charles Crichton (The Lavender Hill Mob) presents to delight and surprise the eye. A phalanx of nannies march through Hyde Park as though each tree and blade of grass belonged to them. The faces of children playing a game evoke the whole mysterious mosaic of human diversity. The interior decoration of an old thief’s brand-new flat hits just the right level of department-store-modern respectability.

There is nothing new or astonishing about Tiger. There is no particularly ingenious heist, no character out of Krafft-Ebing, no bloodshed or lubricity. The things that happen have happened in many another movie. It is the people they happen to that lift the film up and hold it there.