Rough Shoot [Shoot First] *** (1952, Joel McCrea, Herbert Lom, Evelyn Keyes, Marius Goring, Roland Culver, Karel Stepanek, Patricia Laffan, Frank Lawson) – Classic Movie Review 13,558

The 1952 British thriller film Rough Shoot [Shoot First] stars Joel McCrea as a retired US Army Colonel who goes shooting in England, fires buckshot at a man he thinks is a poacher, who is killed and turns out to have been a spy.

Director Robert Parrish’s 1952 British spy thriller film Rough Shoot [Shoot First] is based on the celebrated novel A Rough Shoot by Geoffrey Household, and stars Joel McCrea, Herbert Lom, Evelyn Keyes, Marius Goring, Roland Culver, Karel Stepanek, Patricia Laffan, and Frank Lawson.

Retired US Army Colonel Robert Taine (Joel McCrea) and his wife Cecily (Evelyn Keyes) are living in a village in England. Taine goes out shooting on a hunt on his rented property in Dorset, fires buckshot at a man he thinks is a poacher, who is killed and turns out to have been a spy. Taine believes he has killed the man, but actually a foreign spy named Hiart (Marius Goring) simultaneously shot and killed him. Taine and his wife trail a suspect to London, along with enemy agent Lex (David Hurst), with the police and British intelligence chasing after him, and this leads him to a spy ring.

The intriguing situation, offbeat plotting and oddball characters mark it out as a typical work of British thriller writer Geoffrey Household, with a typical gloss spun over it by screenwriter Eric Ambler, another famed English author of thrillers, particularly spy novels. So we are off to a good start with the writing.

Unfortunately the results are fairly modest, this time, perhaps partly because  American film-maker Robert Parrish is arguably the wrong director for this particular film, a very British one, and also because of the very moderate production by Raymond Stross. Plus, for full effect and maximum impact, the material needs a much darker tone and more intense mood than it receives here, with much jokey, but admittedly amusing dialogue. There’s a whole bizarre conversation about large cabbages, for heaven’s sake, which hardly has a place in spy movies!

Nevertheless, there is a good story to tell here, and a very good, on-form 50s Brit cast to perform it, though, and the underrated Joel McCrea and Evelyn Keyes are fine too. But it is Herbert Lom as as Peter Sandorski, an eccentric Polish operative for British military intelligence, Roland Culver as the snooty British government official Randall, and Marius Goring as the sinister foreign spy Hiart, who smoothly and apparently effortlessly romp away with the acting honours. Megs Jenkins has a decent role as the housekeeper Mrs Powell, but Patricia Laffan is wasted in a nothing role as Hiart’s colleague Magda Hassingham. The climax starting at Waterloo station and ending at London’s Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum is very entertaining in the old Hitchcock style of the 1930s. And Robert Parrish does keep it all moving swiftly and eagerly along.

Oddly it is Joel McCrea’s only postwar non-Western role.

Also in the cast are David Hurst as Lex, Lawrence Naismith as Blossom, Cyril Raymond as Cartwright, Ellis Irving as Wharton, Clement McCallin as Inspector Sullivan, Jack McNaughton as Inspector Matthews, Arnold Bell as Sergeant Baines, Megs Jenkins as Mrs Powell, Powys Thomas, Robert Dickins, and Denis Lehrer as Tommy, and Joan Hickson (last billed for her tiny role, but she does get billing) as ‘woman station announcer’.

British novelist Geoffrey Household (30 November 1900 – 4 October 1988) is best known for his 1939 masterwork novel Rogue Male, filmed in 1941 as Man Hunt with Walter Pidgeon, and remade in 1976 as Rogue Male with Peter O’Toole.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,558

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