Sitting Target (Douglas Hickcox, 1972)

After his wife (Jill St John) tells him she is having another man’s baby and wants a divorce, Harry (Oliver Reed) breaks out of prison to kill her.

As the police scramble to stop him, Harry gets his hands on a gun…

A gritty early 70s thriller, Sitting Target is a great showcase for Oliver Reed.

A hyperbolic action melodrama, Sitting Target is packed with great incident. Any of the plot pieces could serve as the basis for a movie, and it is a testament to the filmmakers that it never comes across as a series of set-pieces. And Reed’s inherent volatility is the ticking bomb at the centre of the movie.

It shares a lot of stylistic DNA with Get Carter and its story bears more than a tip of the hat to Point Blank, but what differentiates it is a sense of momentum. The film seems to be plugged into the same diabolical energy as its leading man.

Director Douglas Hickcox shoots the movie with dutch angles and fish eye lensed close-ups, while editor John Glen cuts the action frenetically, increasing the sense of disorientation and the central character’s frenzied sense of rage.

The UK context reorients what could be the most cliched aspect of the film - Harry having a gun.

This is not an American movie, and Harry is the only character with a firearm, outside of a police sniper we barely glimpse. The film carries a different sense of danger, and the casting of an automatic Mauser pistol (as opposed to an ordinary handgun) feels like an extension of Harry’s destructive tendencies.

As mentioned earlier, the film boasts some great set pieces: the opening prison break; Harry’s abortive assassination attempt and escape through the washing lines; and the explosive finale, in which Harry is betrayed and then pursues his enemies with a Terminator-like relentlessness.

While Reed is impossible to ignore, Ian McShane is also great as Harry’s devious friend Birdy. While Harry is short-tempered, he at least has a code he follows; McShane’s Birdy is purely selfish.

Stanley Myers provides the menacing score, adding a fatalism and mounting sense of danger with odd bursts of synthetic sounds.

The third act reveals that Harry’s desire for revenge is more righteous than it initially appears takes the film more overtly into noir territory.

 

Harry is a victim of his own impulses, an angry man who is brought down by his inability to let things go - to the ludicrous extreme of climbing into the burning car wreck where his dead girlfriend sits, to die when the car gas tank explodes.

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