This very-little-seen British short film about a gunman and the real-estate agent he takes hostage feels a lot more like a 40-minute TV 'play for today' from the seventies than an actual motion picture, and I'm not sure where it was shown when first released. Apparently it was made on a budget of only one thousand pounds, in a few days in a single room: the photography is dull and unremarkable, and there's little action, so everything rests upon the writing and performances of the cast of two.
June Ritchie is perfectly adequate as the terrified estate agent but Edward Woodward raises his role as the gunman to a much higher level, with presence and detail in every moment, and the film's success rests almost entirely on his shoulders, being almost one long soliloquy. The story itself is fairly routine and predictable, but it slots each new piece of plot development into play in ways that keep the tension building and the momentum moving forwards, and never gets boring.
"Hunted" doesn't do anything well enough to make it a classic, but as a largely lost short film from the past, made for practically nothing and then forgotten for 50 years, it's a nice thing to discover.
6¾/10.
