I remember this film being on Anglia Television one night in 1972 when I was thirteen, but didn't catch it at the time. In the intervening half century I've become familiar with other work by it's talented British director Philip Leacock, but 'The Rabbit Trap' has never to my knowledge been shown on British TV again. Now thanks to the miracle of YouTube I've finally caught up with it.
'The Rabbit Trap' is very much of its time, hailing from Ernest Borgnine's post-'Marty' bounce when he was being entrusted with sympathetic roles as an honest working stiff, and - like 'Marty' - adapted from a TV original. Leacock was renowned for his ability to direct children, and it's interesting to speculate how I would have reacted to it as a 13 year-old, but watching it now I found the story of the father far more compelling than that of Kevin Corcoran as the son; with the subject matter, alas, more timely than ever.
In 1965 a senate subcommittee predicted that by the year 2000 Americans would only be working 20 hours a week with seven weeks vacation. Instead, a much higher percentage of U.S. employees are now working 40 hours a week or more just to make ends meet compared with the 28 countries in the European Union. One of the many ways Hollywood movies gloss over grim reality is that everyone seems to have so much free time to do interesting stuff when in actuality less than half of the American workforce in 2015 used all the paid leave they were legally entitled to, with an extraordinary shortfall of 658,000,000 days unclaimed.
None of the previous reviewers mention that that Colt's boss Spellman himself has a boss called Cochran who we barely see, doubtless giving him even greater grief than he's giving Colt; just as I personally work for managers being bullied by people at head office who we on the floor rarely if ever come into contact with. (I work for the Royal Mail, which was privatised four years ago with the result that less and less staff are being kept on while being whipped to work harder and harder to generate greater profits just to go down the gullets of foreign shareholders oblivious of our existence.) If Spellman seems obtuse about what's really troubling Colt it's because author J.P.Miller frustratingly never allows Colt to get as far as clarifying to him that it's not the failure to present his son with a newly captured pet bunny rabbit that's troubling them but the fact that a living creature is facing a slow, miserable and claustrophobic death from starvation. That the trap eventually turns out to be empty is a nice touch, but immaterial, as the trap still needed to be disabled to prevent it imprisoning another of God's creatures in, say, a week's time (the same God that not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without Him knowing it). The 'End' caption that then appears on screen - as in many films - is in fact far from being the end of this particular story, and it would have been interesting (albeit probably very depressing) to have learned what the coming days, weeks, months and years would have had in store for the Colts.
'The Rabbit Trap' is very much of its time, hailing from Ernest Borgnine's post-'Marty' bounce when he was being entrusted with sympathetic roles as an honest working stiff, and - like 'Marty' - adapted from a TV original. Leacock was renowned for his ability to direct children, and it's interesting to speculate how I would have reacted to it as a 13 year-old, but watching it now I found the story of the father far more compelling than that of Kevin Corcoran as the son; with the subject matter, alas, more timely than ever.
In 1965 a senate subcommittee predicted that by the year 2000 Americans would only be working 20 hours a week with seven weeks vacation. Instead, a much higher percentage of U.S. employees are now working 40 hours a week or more just to make ends meet compared with the 28 countries in the European Union. One of the many ways Hollywood movies gloss over grim reality is that everyone seems to have so much free time to do interesting stuff when in actuality less than half of the American workforce in 2015 used all the paid leave they were legally entitled to, with an extraordinary shortfall of 658,000,000 days unclaimed.
None of the previous reviewers mention that that Colt's boss Spellman himself has a boss called Cochran who we barely see, doubtless giving him even greater grief than he's giving Colt; just as I personally work for managers being bullied by people at head office who we on the floor rarely if ever come into contact with. (I work for the Royal Mail, which was privatised four years ago with the result that less and less staff are being kept on while being whipped to work harder and harder to generate greater profits just to go down the gullets of foreign shareholders oblivious of our existence.) If Spellman seems obtuse about what's really troubling Colt it's because author J.P.Miller frustratingly never allows Colt to get as far as clarifying to him that it's not the failure to present his son with a newly captured pet bunny rabbit that's troubling them but the fact that a living creature is facing a slow, miserable and claustrophobic death from starvation. That the trap eventually turns out to be empty is a nice touch, but immaterial, as the trap still needed to be disabled to prevent it imprisoning another of God's creatures in, say, a week's time (the same God that not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without Him knowing it). The 'End' caption that then appears on screen - as in many films - is in fact far from being the end of this particular story, and it would have been interesting (albeit probably very depressing) to have learned what the coming days, weeks, months and years would have had in store for the Colts.