A Major Disappointment

A Brilliant Conflict

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

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

Although Tiger Bay was the official debut of Hayley Mills, she was actually seen in another of her father's films So Well Remembered years earlier as an infant. I guess we should call Tiger Bay her conscious debut.In Tiger Bay Hayley's a London slum kid who's a tomboy and likes nothing better than playing cowboys and Indians with the boys and their cap pistols which were as popular there as this side of the pond. She also gets a gun of her own, only it's a real one recently used to murder one of her neighbors.The neighbor is Yvonne Mitchell who likes her gentleman callers. When Horst Buchholtz a Polish sailor returns on his merchant ship and finds her sleeping around he loses it and pumps several shots into Mitchell. Mills sees him do it, but she develops a curious relationship with Bucholtz and imagines him to be the one who will take her from her dreary slum life.I read here that the original story and part was intended for a boy and it might make better sense had it been done that way. Tiger Bay comes very close to having Bucholtz be a child molester. Saying that however Hayley Mills's talent is pretty clear and note how Walt Disney feminized her image a bit to get her the success she had as his child star meal ticket in the early 60s. Besides Bucholtz, Hayley's best scenes are with her father John Mills who plays the Scotland Yard man on the homicide case. She willfully misleads the police so much so that as an adult she'd be charged with obstruction.Tiger Bay is a good film, but they should have made it with a boy protagonist.

Dear J.Lee Thompson,you did make a superb film every once in a while in what was a patchy career. Tiger Bay is one of those superb films.It starts off as a sort of a film of place. I liked the English port town filled with a mix of native British and Polish and Caribbean immigrants. With everyone living cooped up together in small flats and narrow spaces.Then it turns into a man and girl on the run film. The chemistry between Hayley Mills and Horst Buchholz really worked. Hayley Mill's performance is probably among the top ten ever by a child artist. Her calm and cunning demeanor is a perfect foil for Buchholz' intensity.The film is also a great crime thriller. There were a lot of interesting twists. The final scenes kept me on the edge of my seat.I liked how you made the viewer care for the murderer. I was rooting for him in the end.Best Regards, Pimpin.(8/10)

For a movie that starts with a murder fueled by rage and ends with a dangerous decision to be made in rough seas, Tiger Bay is one of the most touching and endearing studies of childhood and friendship you could hope to see. Please note that elements of the plot are discussed. When a young Polish seaman named Korchinsky (Horst Buchholz) returns to his home port in Wales after a long spell at sea, he is the happiest man alive. He has some money in his pocket and a good-looking girlfriend. He can hardly wait to arrive at her apartment flat, which he has been paying the rent on. But he meets someone else living there. When he finally locates his girl, he finds she's been seeing someone else, a man she thinks has "class." It's the old story. She begins screaming at him. He loses his temper and screams back. She pulls a gun from a dresser drawer and orders him out of her apartment and out of her life. In a mater of seconds he's wrestled the gun away from her and she's lying dead on the floor of multiple bullet wounds. And while this has been going on, ten-year-old Gillie (Hayley Mills) has been crouched down and staring at what she could see through the mail slot in the door. Gillie is bright and quick. She lives with her aunt down the hall. She's good at making up stories, not lies, exactly, but close enough. Her friends won't play cops and robbers with her because she doesn't have a toy gun. She loves to imagine adventures. Korchinsky hears the police arriving. He hides the gun and then hides himself. As soon as he disappears, Gillie nips in and takes the gun from where she saw Korchinsky hide it. But now Korchinsky spots her. For the rest of the movie we follow Gillie as she avoids Korchinsky, as she shows off the gun to a friend during choir, and as Detective Superintendent Graham (John Mills) questions Gillie and the neighbors to try to make sense of the murder. It doesn't take long for Korchinsky to abduct Gillie with a tale of escaping on an adventure to another country. He knows she is the only one who can identify him. Gillie, her head full of excitement, is no dummy, but she longs for what she imagines. Korchinsky, in fact, turns out to be a young man over his head, almost as young in some ways as Gillie. He begins to see Gillie as the same kind of uncomplicated dreamer in some ways he is. While he convinces Gillie not to give him away, he leaves her for a few hours so he can sign on to a ship soon to sail for Caracas. When Gillie is found alone and waiting for Korchinsky to return, Superintendent Graham must try to convince Gillie that Korchinsky is dangerous and that she must corporate to capture him. Gillie, despite the best efforts of Graham, will not betray her friend. The cat and mouse struggle between Graham and Gillie is one of the most amusing situations in the movie. The climax is on the freighter bound for Caracas just outside the three mile zone off the coast of Wales. The inspector has arrived on a pilot boat with Gillie to identify Korchinsky. He is determined to bring Korchinsky in. Just when it looks like Korchinsky will be safe, Gillie falls overboard in the high seas. The only one who sees her fall is Korchinsky. If he lets her die unseen, he will remain on the ship and be safe as it heads away from Britain. If he dives in to try to save Gillie, he will be picked up by the pilot boat, even if he saves her, and returned to Wales, sooner or later to be tried for murder. It's his choice and he has only seconds to decide. This was Hayley Mills first movie. She was 13 and she is extraordinary. Buchholz and Mills (her father) do fine jobs, but the movie fails or succeeds on whether or not the person of Gillie captures us. We not only have to identify with Gillie, we have to believe in her. Mills makes Gillie a person we root for, a person we understand why she won't turn in her friend even after she realizes he won't be taking her anywhere. Mills does all this with straightforward and unaffected charm, and without a speck of sentimentality. But nothing is perfect in this world, and Tiger Bay is cursed with one of the most awful screen scores I've ever heard. It's not only loud, it's cloyingly sentimental with tons of lush strings. Worse, it punctuates every tense scene with cliché-ridden horn stings and drum beats. The score does a disservice to the movie.

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.