"Shoot First" is a Cold War suspense film that kept having ask "why did he do that?" as much of the behavior of the leading character, Lt. Colonel Taine (Joel McCrea) made little sense.The story is set in England. American Lt. Colonel Taine and his wife live there and rent some land where the Colonel likes to hunt. One day, he sees someone on the land and he thinks it's a poacher...so he decides to put some birdshot into the guy and teach him a lesson. However, just as Taine fires, so does a hidden enemy agent...but this shot is from a rifle and it kills the supposed poacher. But Taine thinks he did it and hides the body. Now don't you think in doing this he would have seen a rifle shot?? And, that the shot was on the OTHER side of the man's body?? Well, apparently this Colonel knows little about guns and he just hopes no one finds him.In the meantime, enemy agents are lurking everywhere around the property. So what do the forces of NATO do? They send one man (Herbert Lom) to look into it. And, when they find spies, instead of calling in troops, he and Taine get caught up in trying to capture them!! Considering the future of the free world hangs in the balance, this does seem like a stupid plan!As you might have guessed, I did not love this film. In addition to not making much sense, the film also was awfully dull...which is odd for an espionage film.

Shoot First has the distinction of being the only non-western that Joel McCrea appeared in from 1946 until the end of his career. It was a bad mistake, worse than that when you consider the source is an Eric Ambler novel which usually translate well to the screen you have to scratch your head and wonder.McCrea plays an army colonel stationed in the United Kingdom with wife Evelyn Keyes and they have a small country place where McCrea does occasional rabbit and grouse shooting. He shoots with a light load of buckshot some foreign speaking gentleman he catches on his land mistakes for a poacher. Later on he returns and finds him dead and hides the body.After that McCrea and Keyes get involved in a web of spies and intrigue as McCrea realizes he's in a jackpot facing a possible murder charge.This is where I have real problems with a film that has Hitchcockian pretensions. This is not Cary Grant an advertising man caught up with spies, this is a professional soldier. No way in the world could you make it believable that McCrea would act like this in his situation. The plot premise is just ridiculous.One thing this British production has going for it is Patricia Laffan one of the sexiest women ever in British cinema. American audiences will know her best for playing Poppaea in Quo Vadis. She plays a foreign wife of a dissolute Englishman Frank Lawton who's involved with foreign agents. She's always a treat as is Herbert Lom as an exiled Polish count whom were never quite sure about.But they are not enough to save this one.

Like CIRCLE OF DANGER (1951; see my review elsewhere), this is a British thriller with a lightweight American lead, in this case Joel McCrea; also like that earlier Jacques Tourneur film, this has a decidedly Hitchcockian flavor to it (down to a Bernard Herrmann-esque score, though he would only team up with The Master three years later!) and is, in effect, a livelier example of its kind. Interestingly, both Ray Milland (star of DANGER) and McCrea would work for Hitchcock on DIAL 'M' FOR MURDER (1954) and FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT (1940) respectively. The film under review is based on a Geoffrey Household novel and, like Fritz Lang's similarly-sourced MAN HUNT (1941), it centers around a hunting aficionado whose favorite pastime lands him in hot water; the screen adaptation was itself penned by celebrated crime novelist Eric Ambler.Abetting McCrea in his struggle are understanding wife Evelyn Keyes (she had already portrayed her definitive noir role in 1951 courtesy of Joseph Losey's THE PROWLER), Polish military 'mental case' Herbert Lom (unusually a good guy despite his obvious ambivalence) and sympathetic British Intelligence man Roland Culver. Their antagonists, then, are first-rate marksman Marius Goring (from the afore-mentioned CIRCLE OF DANGER but in a less showy role), sinister chauffeur Karel Stepanek and mysterious Austrian female Patricia Laffan (equally enigmatic off-screen, since the promise she showed in the definitive 1951 version of QUO VADIS was never delivered upon!); curiously enough, her alcoholic and uncommitted (to the cause) husband here – played by Frank Lawton (from 1935's David COPPERFIELD) – basically disappears halfway through the proceedings! The exciting action takes us from McCrea's shooting grounds (doubling as a night-time airfield for the villains' purposes) through an impersonation game to a perilous train journey to a notable climax at London's world-renowned "Madame Tussaud's" wax museum. Here, Goring startlingly blows himself up to safeguard the all-important documents that a typically meek defecting scientist had brought over with him from the other side. For the record, this was released in the U.S. as SHOOT FIRST, which is the name attached to the TCM-sourced copy I watched. One final thing: former actor and Oscar-winning editor Robert Parrish had graduated to the director's chair shortly before this, in 1951 – with two more noirs which I should be watching presently, namely CRY DANGER and THE MOB.

A Hitchcock like espionage movie shot by the American director Robert Parrish in England, in the early 50's. We had already seen this kind of try with Jacques Tourneur's CIRCLE OF DANGER, except that this latest film was not an espionage one. It's surprising to see Joel Mc Crea in a non western feature. And it's a pretty good success. As far as I remember, and perhaps I am wrong because I did not see it since twenty years, the Tourneur's movie included a hunting party too, but perhaps not at the beginning, like this one.We easily feel the British influence in this programmer, and not only through the actors. But the general atmosphere sounds nevertheless mainly from the USA.A fairly good caper film.