Lightdeossk Captivating movie !

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

ActuallyGlimmer The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Johan Louwet Rating this movie was not an easy thing to do. Giving it 9/10 might sound a bit crazy for a movie with a pretty straightforward story like this. However it's mainly the extraordinary performance of 12 year old Hayley Mills as Gillie that eventually decided to go 1 higher than I initially intended to give. The chemistry between her and Horst Buchholz as Polish sailor Bronic was amazing. The role of superintendent Graham was played by Hayley's father who might or might not have anything to do with the introduction of his daughter to the movie world. Whatever it is I'm grateful it happened as later on Hayley would put on other awesome performances in both drama and family movies. For me she is one of those actresses that can take a movie to a higher level. In this movie I didn't have the feeling those were father and daughter in real. Same can be said for The Chalk Garden in which John Mills plays the butler. Tiger Bay works wonderfully in black and white, adds to the atmosphere. It has great settings with the haven, boats, streets and apartments having an authentic look truthful to its time.

Steve Skafte Like a lot of people, I suppose, I was familiar with young Hayley Mills through her Disney films of the early to mid-60s. It's somewhat of a shame that she was shuffled into less challenging child-oriented fare when she offered such a fascinating performance in this, her very first film. I was pleased to find a copy of it, especially being that the vast majority of her early non-Disney pictures are quite rare if not forgotten altogether.Although it was Mills that brought "Tiger Bay" to my attention, it has much more to offer than that. J Lee Thompson, whose greatest and most known achievement was "Cape Fear", handles the direction of this film with a kind of grace and style uncommon to 1959. There are things that place it squarely in the period - the soundtrack, for one - but it has a very free, alive feeling that overcomes convention. There is a lot of on-location shooting, and the black & white cinematography is both realistic and very engaging.The other actors are all good, though somewhat on the over-the-top side at times. I liked Horst Buchholz (who I'd seen before, but never noticed). He plays the role of the spurned lover quite well, but the character goes from being angry and violent to downright likable far too quickly to be completely convincing. John Mills (Hayley Mills' father) plays the serious detective-type quite well, very intense.I really enjoyed "Tiger Bay" it has enough energy and pace to keep you engaged. It never drags or gets lost on its way to conclusion. For a film of its kind from the period in which it was produced, this is one of the best I've seen. This is a great little thriller.

James Hitchcock "Tiger Bay" is one of the best British films of the late fifties, and can be classified as forming part of the "kitchen sink" social-realist movement which was a noted feature of the British cinema during those years, although it perhaps has less in the way of social comment than some other films of that type, concentrating more on thriller elements. It was made by the talented director J. Lee Thompson, who was responsible for another great film from the previous year, "Ice Cold in Alex". Like many of the best British movies, this one has a strong sense of place. Tiger Bay is a working-class area of Cardiff around the city's docks, noted for its multi-racial and multi-cultural character long before multi-racialism and multi-culturalism became buzzwords of political correctness. Many of its inhabitants were foreign seamen, and the area also became notorious for a high level of unsolved crimes, committed by men who disappeared back to sea before the police had a chance to arrest them.It is one of these seamen who is at the heart of the film. Bronislaw Korczynski is a young Polish sailor who returns from a voyage to find that his girlfriend, Anya, has left him for another man; a violent quarrel ends with him shooting her dead. Unknown to him, the crime has been witnessed by a twelve-year-old girl, Gillie, who was watching the scene through the letterbox. (For some reason, the name "Gillie" is always pronounced with a hard "g"). Like Korczynski, Gillie is an outsider in Tiger Bay; she is originally from London and lives with her aunt. (She is possibly an orphan, although this is never made clear). She finds Korczynski's gun, which he has hidden after the killing, and takes it, hoping that it will win her more acceptance among the local children, who have excluded her from their games of cowboys-and-Indians on the grounds that she does not possess a toy gun of her own. Korczynski goes on the run from the police, hoping that he can sign on a foreign ship and be out of the country before they can arrest him for the murder. Realising that Gillie can identify him, he kidnaps her to prevent her from talking to the authorities, and a strange friendship grows up between them. This friendship can be seen as a result of either Gillie's first romantic love or the desire of a fatherless girl for a father-figure in her life (even though Korczynski is hardly old enough to be her biological father). This was Hayley Mills' first film and her performance is absolutely captivating. It made her an instant star, and led to her being signed up by Disney. She did, however, have time to make one more great British film, "Whistle Down the Wind", which has certain parallels with "Tiger Bay". In both films Hayley plays a young girl who befriends a criminal on the run, and both strongly evoke a spirit of place. (The later film is set in the rural hinterland of a Lancashire mill town). In both films the principal male character is a murderer, and yet not entirely unsympathetic. Alan Bates' Arthur Blakey in "Whistle…." is a rough, taciturn man, but there is something about his demeanour that suggests he could have been better under different circumstances.Horst Buchholz's Korczynski is perhaps even more sympathetic than Blakey. Indeed, the film seems designed to arouse our sympathy for him. He is young, good-looking, hard-working and friendly (one of our first sights in the film is of him stopping to play with a group of children). He is in exile from his homeland, at this period under an oppressive Communist regime. He seems to be desperately in love with Anya, even though she (to judge from the little we see of her) hardly seems to deserve him, and his crime was committed in a moment of passion. This is one crime film where the audience will all be rooting for the criminal to get away. It would have been impossible for any adult star to avoid being upstaged by the irrepressible Hayley, but Buchholz comes close to holding his own with her. There is also a good performance from Hayley's father, John, as the policeman leading the investigation."Whistle Down the Wind", in which the children mistake Blakey for Jesus Christ returned to earth, is a deeply religious allegory of the Christian faith (which makes it something of a rarity in cinema history). "Tiger Bay" also has religious overtones, underlined by the fact that Gillie is a chorister at her local church, although they are less marked, and there is no consistent allegorical pattern. The film's climax comes when the police board the Venezuelan ship on which Korczynski has signed on. Because, however, the ship is outside Britain's three-mile territorial limit, they have no legal power to arrest him, and the ship's captain refuses to allow him to be removed. Gillie has been brought on board by the police, who hope that she will identify Korczynski, but she refuses to betray her friend, and attempts to run away. In doing so, she slips and falls overboard. Without hesitating, Korczynski, who is a strong swimmer, dives into the sea to save her, even though he knows that this will lead to his arrest for Anya's murder and possibly to his execution. (Britain still had the death penalty in 1959). This scene brought to my mind the words from St John's Gospel "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends". 9/10

brkeys Although quite familiar with nearly every scene and plot twist, it was interesting to view Tiger Bay as a grownup. It's an adult movie about a child's emerging sense of morality. Initially, Gillie is all about telling lies just to get her way (a toy bomb, an extra shilling, an hour of independence) and then gradually (you can actually perceive the wheels turning in her head) she realizes that lies can also serve to protect a loved one. The film is very good, but it's really all about Hayley Mills; she's fairly astonishing. She doesn't just steal the movie by being cute; she carefully delivers a thoughtful performance. Her character grows by learning to care for someone (breaking in new, unselfish emotions), developing her own standards for right and wrong, and experiencing raw heartbreak. The interrogation scenes where she spontaneously calculates her responses while barely concealing that everything's a lie - they're so realistic, they're genius.Remember that scene in the church loft? It starts out agonizingly suspenseful and scary; if you'd never seen the film before , you'd wonder, is she going to accidentally wound him? end up controlling him? Is he going to keep chasing after her, eventually kidnap her? And then gradually, through brief exchanges, they recognize that they are kindred souls - misfits, lonely, misunderstood, unappreciated. Within minutes, the scene has mellowed into this moment where they look at each other over a burning candle and spontaneously grin at each other.You can also glimpse and interject an interesting back story for Gillie: she's an orphan living with her aunt, Mrs. Phillips. So where's Mr. Phillips? Killed in WWII? They don't say. Gillie is obviously a recent transplant (a kid yells "go back to London!" at the beginning), she's apparently an orphan, and she's growing up neglected in this Cardiff tenement where bitter war-torn grownups are barely hanging on to their lives. You perceive these details as an adult, and they add new layers. Apparently Hayley got a lot of international attention after this movie, and not just from Disney. Certainly director J. Lee Thompson The Guns of Navarone)had much to do with coaxing Hayley's performance, but the talent and charisma are all hers.