Brighton Rock...

 

At the moment I am still trying to make the not-lockdown-unless-you’re-in-entertainment go away by watching old films.  The other night I watched Brighton Rock again for the first time in years.  Watching it older and wiser I saw it very differently which is always the way.  For one thing this time out I was painfully aware what a terrible gangster Pinky Brown (an incredibly young Richard Attenborough) is. 

I knew from watching it years ago that he and his gang are meant to be a bit rubbish but it was painfully obvious this time round that one of the problems with Pinky is he’s ludicrously over promoted.  The gang’s previous boss Kite has been murdered in an off screen backstory which is too complicated to explain and the film really charts how the gang which had once been fearsome falls apart under Pinky’s new management.

Pinky is a psychopath which doesn’t help social cohesion within the gang and his number two Dallow (William Hartnell pre Doctor Who) talks a good game and looks the thug but is actually a bit of a coward who uses Pinky to do all the dirty work.  Pinky’s gang is actually modelled on the Sabini racetrack gang of the 1930s (who also appear in Peaky Blinders) and apparently one of Sabini’s henchmen was brought in as an advisor to show Richard Attenborough how to behave with a razor.  There’s a sentence one doesn’t write every day.

The theme of the novel is determinism with Hermione Baddeley as Ida Arnold the entertainer turned investigator who claims that Pinky is incapable of change.  Well, he does appear to be a stone cold psychopath but is he really beyond redemption?  He actually spends a lot of the film trying to sell the firm out in different ways.  By the end of the film he and Dallow have completely sold out to a rival firm as theirs has collapsed … is he actually trying to get out?  Or is he just completely ruthless and good or bad at calculating the odds?  Perhaps?  Or perhaps it’s Dallow (one of nature’s number twos in every sense of the word) who wants to get out more and is more ruthless in knowing Pinky is a pyschopath and goading him on to more and more murders?  By the point at which they take a bung to close down it's just Pinky and Dallow and without Dallow's support …

Hermione Baddeley is fantastic in this film.  The scene where she’s engaged in a musical dance number with a line of other performers dressed in clown costumes and spots Pinky in the spectators and he spots her is brilliant.  So much is said without a word being uttered – except, of course, the utterly inappropriate words of the song…

Carol Marsh gives an interesting performance as Rose despite never having had any acting training.  The Boulting Brothers put an add in the paper for someone “frail, innocent, naive, and tolerably but not excessively pretty.”  Carol said that “People were very, very cruel. Why didn’t they just leave me alone? ... I’ve never seen the film and I couldn’t bear to ….” And claimed she was “preyed upon” during the filming.  By whom one wonders? But any #metoo scandal will have gone with the cast to their graves long since…?

The ending  – invented by the Boulting brothers to avoid any more displeasure from the censors than having Richard Attenborough slash people with a razor had already created - and hated by Graham Green is one of the best ironic twist endings in a film ever and says so much about Rose and Pinky's abusive relationship.  Watching it again one started to see her less as the innocent and more as a knowing gangster's moll who's in on the skullduggery.  Of course she's meant to be 16 (actually she was 21) but never-the-less the film asks difficult questions about personal culpibility and complicity.