Sinful Davey

Some months back, TCM ran a new-to-me movie with a synopsis that sounded interesting, so I recorded it to watch and do a blog post on here. That movie is John Huston's Sinful Davey.

John Hurt plays David Haggart, a young man who at the start of the movie is set to be executed, and dictating his memoirs, much like the start of Kind Hearts and Coronets. Flash back to some time in the past....

Haggart is somewhere in the Scottish highlands as a drummer for a Scottish regiment into which he was drafted, circa 1820. Haggart is absolutely not cut out for the military, so at the first opportunity he jumps off a bridge to desert. He escapes in part because they didn't have photographs back in those days to show what David looked like, so he could disguise himself more easily. But when he runs into MacNab (Ronald Fraser), MacNab knows David's true identity.

MacNab is a pickpocket, while David's father happened to be a thief too, albeit a rather more grandiose thief who was eventually hanged for his thievery. David claims he grew up in a workhouse near the prison where his father was hanged, and even built a cairn to memorialize his father although he has no real idea where Dad was buried. All David knows is that he wants to follow in Dad's footsteps, and do the one thing Dad couldn't, which is to carry off a big heist.

But that's going to have to wait a while, because David gets caught, sent to a jail, breaks out, and starts another series of small-scale robberies. All along the way, he's constantly interfered with by his old childhood friend Annie (Pamela Franklin), who love him and claims she's really trying to save David.

Eventually, David steals some aristocratic clothes which enables him to pass himself off as someone of more means when he meets the Duke of Argyll (Robert Morley). The Duke and Duchess are holding a big party, and David sees this as his chance to make a name for himself by robbing the party guests blind with the help of MacNab and MacNab's ladyfriend Carlisle. Now to stay clear of Annie and the police....

Sinful Davey is an amiable little movie that was conceived as a comedy, and I can see John Huston going for a vibe that's part Kind Hearts and Coronets and part Tom Jones. But for whatever reason, Sinful Davey doesn't work anywhere near as well as the other two movies. It feels plodding even though it's got a relatively short running time, and although it's certainly not a heavy drama, it feels like much of the comedy has been sucked out of it. Apparently there were disastrous previews, and when Huston wouldn't edit it into something that might work better, the producers decided to do it for him, with the result that we see. Considering the problems I've had with some of Huston's other movies, such as The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, this really doesn't surprise me.

As for what works, Hurt tries hard, and there's a lot of lovely cinematography, with Ireland (a place Huston loved) substituting for Scotland. The latter scenes, once Morley shows up, also start to breath some life into the movie, but damn if it doesn't take a long time getting there. Sinful Davey is a movie I really wanted to like, but had a lot of trouble doing so. Still, it's available on DVD, so you may want to track down a copy to judge for yourself.