The Intruder (1953)

Directed by Guy Hamilton; produced by Ivan Foxwell

Wolf Merton (Jack Hawkins), a successful stock broker and former British Army colonel, returns home one night to find a burglar in his home. What’s more startling than the criminal’s presence is his identity: ‘Ginger’ Edwards (Michael Medwin), an erstwhile member of Merton’s regiment. Edwards flees the scene, leaving his former commanding officer with a mystery he feels compelled to solve: why would a good soldier, decorated for bravery, turn to crime? 

Some mystery-movies need to be complicated to be involving, their plots intricate. Some are very straightforward, yet draw the viewer in with their characters, and with the story’s construction. The Intruder falls into the latter category. As Merton tries to track down the fugitive, he meets a number of those whom he knew from the war; most have prospered to various extents, and most deserved to. Each shows a different personality, a different aspect to the regiment and the war.

In a way, though Edwards is the central character, the story is less a mystery than it is a depiction, a depiction of not just one character but several. It doesn’t go deeply into each; it is not a study of personalities. It shows something with which people in the early 1950s would have been familiar: the cross-section of humanity that went to war.

Merton is a well-drawn character, though just a few strokes of the writer’s pen are used to illustrate him. We see the brusque regimental commander, the sort of man that most of his soldiers saw, but we also understand the ordinary man behind that role, strong, but not really forceful. Edwards is less defined, and comes across more as someone to whom things have happened, rather than a factor in his own destiny.

This highlights the less successful elements of the story. While the causes of Edwards’s downfall are plausible enough, there is no graduation to his situation’s deterioration. It all occurs more or less at once, even on one day, and is therefore a tragic tale rather than a tragedy, which would have been better.

But the creation of the mystery is, as implied above, not really the draw in The Intruder. Aside from the characters, and their interaction, there are smaller features that suggest thought was put into the story and its presentation. At the beginning, for instance, in the initial flashback, Merton’s regiment is fighting in the Western Desert, and equipped with Sherman tanks. By the time they are in France, breaking out from Normandy, they are equipped with Cromwells. This is not only accurate (and, considering hundreds of thousands of Britons alive in 1953 would have served with tanks, and tens of thousands in tanks, there was a need for that), but gives the story a sense of progression; a change of something so significant suggests the passage of time.

While The Intruder might be seen as a mystery or a crime-drama, it’s more a set of character sketches, interesting and entertaining - one quite amusing - that makes a coherent and satisfying film.