Oddments

Perennial heavy Pat Roach gets heavy in 'Gangsters', and I'm not just talking about his jewellery.

The Long Goodbye

If you want to see really good screen acting, just watch the last couple of minutes of 'The Long Good Friday' and watch Hoskins go through a dozen emotions just using his massive face and expressive eyes. Subtle, believable, you can read his frantic jumble of thoughts so well that it doesn't need anything apart from a big close up - the moving picture that says a thousand words. The car journey from hell - to hell.    

Who Lit The Fuse?

'The Long Good Friday' takes two bete noirs of the seventies - gangsters and the IRA - and makes them fight, like 'Alien Vs. Predator' with worse teeth. it's a superb film: lean, savage, surprising - and the ending is one of the most unnerving in British cinema.

Bob Hoskins plays Harold Shand, a pugnacious East End crook who, having risen to the top by killing all of his opponents, is now looking to consolidate his position by doing a deal with the Mafia to develop what is now known as Docklands, just in time, he hopes, for Britain to host the 1988 Olympics. Without Shand's knowledge, a few of his mob have (rather unwisely) pissed off the Irish Republican Army, who then go after Shand and his boys with all the knives, guns, bombs and masonry nails they have at their disposal.

A film rich in dialogue, atmosphere and performances, 'The Long Good Friday' packs about three hours of story into just over an hour and a half and, like all the best tragedies, ends up with more or less everybody dead, lost or facing disaster or, in Harold's case, a mix of all three, as we never find out exactly what happens to him, although I think its safe to assume the very worst.

Perhaps the benchmark for the British gangster genre, how can you not love a film where Belloq from 'Raiders Of The Lost Ark' gets knifed trying to pick up Pierce Brosnan? Or where Denzil from 'Only Fools & Horses' gets his bare arse slashed with a machete? Or, best of all, where Charlie from 'Casualty' is stabbed repeatedly in the jugular vein with a broken bottle? All in all, it's a pretty stabby sort of film (although there are also shootings and blowing ups): brutal, brilliant, British.

The Long Good Friday

Not For The Squeamish

'The Squeeze' has a bit of a reputation as an under-appreciated classic but, for me, although it has its moments and a great cast, it simply isn't dynamic or consistent enough to be anything other than an interesting also ran. The superb Stacy Keach plays Jim Naboth, a Scotland Yard detective turned private investigator turned skid row alcoholic. When his ex-wife is kidnapped as a prelude to a million pound security van heist, Naboth gets dragged back into the game, ultimately overcoming his problems temporarily to prove more than a match for his ruthless opponents.

As well as Mr. Keach, who maintains a good but rather too generic English accent throughout, we get Edward Fox, Stephen Boyd, Alan Ford, Roy Marsden, Carol White and, playing a real bastard, Island favourite David Hemmings. Freddie Starr plays Naboth's best mate in a stilted and uncomfortable performance that was inexplicably praised at the time, perhaps simply because Freddie confounded expectations and didn't do it dressed as Hitler.    

It's an interesting story, sleazy and violent, but it has far too many characters and is too fond of going off at tangents, which is fine if you are Raymond Chandler, but just seems untidy here. The film is building nicely to a climax, for example, when for no particular reason, it takes a ten minute diversion for a scene set in a massage parlour which is amusing, but completely diffuses the tension and derails the narrative. Director Michael Apted seems too keen to give it a documentary feel, so there are very few 'compositions' - it's all filmed on the hoof, and seems slightly scruffy and muddled, as if the action is always at the corner of the screen.

Somewhere in 'The Squeeze' there is a first rate crime film waiting to get out, or, at least, a bloody good episode of 'The Sweeney', but it's thirty years too late to do it now. Don't be put off by that, though, it's still worth watching, if only for some of the trousers.  

The Squeeze

Chilling Story

Highly controversial on its release for being 'too soon'. 'The Black Panther' is an unadorned account of the true life and crimes of Donald Neilson, the robber, kidnapper and killer who was Britain's public enemy number one in the mid-seventies. A very capable man in some respects, Neilson was also a psychopath, and his long string of crimes reflect his love of violence and obsession with military planning and living in the woods like a proto-Rambo.

The film is deadpan, matter of fact - but the crimes themselves are bloody and cruel and, for all their advance planning, seem chaotic and impulsive. His most infamous deed, the kidnapping and eventual murder of seventeen year old heiress Lesley Whittle, is by necessity at the heart of the drama, but the real life complexity of the case is difficult to portray, and the film loses a little focus as it wades through the comedy of errors, coincidences and missed opportunities that led to her death (the high ranking detective in charge was subsequently reduced in rank to uniformed police constable). 

Neilson was finally arrested after vaingloriously trying to hijack a police car. There was a struggle, and the coppers and members of the public kicked the shit out of him as a crowd stood by watching and eating chips.  

Neilson served his life sentence, and died in Norwich prison in 2011.

The Black Panther

 

The Most Shocking Story Of The Century!

‘10 Rillington Place’ is a horrible film, as it should be: it deals with horrible things. Grimly documenting the squalid murders of John Reginald Christie, it achieves an almost documentary quality. It isn’t easy to watch, although it’s harder to turn away.

Richard Attenborough plays Christie as a whispering, wheedling, pathetic non-person who is only defined by his willingness to cause pain, to take life. I’m not a huge fan of Sir Dickie, but his performance here is extraordinary, not least because it is so enormously unsympathetic. There is nothing remotely likeable or even pitiable about Christie, and his murders, fuelled by rage and sexual aberration, are unforgiveable, especially as they led to the execution of an innocent man, Timothy Evans, played with heart-breaking incomprehension by John Hurt.

Whenever I think of Christie, I feel as if I want to wash my hands, and the film perfectly evokes the sleazy horror of his life and crimes, from the degraded, slum like conditions in which his crimes were perpetrated*, the mean, desperate lives of his victims and their awful post-mortem fate, shoved under floorboards and into cupboards to moulder away – and all of it conducted in the shadow of the noose – the eye for an eye which demeans any society that sanctions it.

I haven’t always been anti-death penalty, by the way. When I was younger it seemed a perfectly sensible solution to the problem. Then I saw this film.

*The film was made on location, but at number 7 as the tenants of 10 didn’t want to move out. In a way, I’m relieved – the film is macabre enough as it is. The whole street was demolished soon afterwards.

10 Rillington Place

Oi, Slags!

Starting at Midnight, it's CRIME WEEK on The Island. Understood? Good. Right, now do one.