BRIGHTON ROCK (2010) - A noble failure

When writer-director Rowan Joffe introduced the preview screening of BRIGHTON ROCK at the BFI last night, he was apologetic. He apologised for daring to take on the Boulting Brothers' classic adaptation, but argued that his movie was borne out deep respect and love of Graham Greene's novel. In the production notes he went further, arguing that Greene's novel was so great, that it DESERVED more that one interpretation. I thought this was a rather odd introduction. Good art should never apologise for itself. And how can one separate the novel from the film in the case where the novelist actually wrote the screenplay?

At any rate, taking Joffe at his word, this is what is likely to happen in any broadly faithful version of Brighton Rock. A violent teenage racketeer called Pinkie murders Fred Hale, a member of the most powerful gang in town. He has to seduce an innocent young girl called Rose in order to find out if she really does know who did it, and prevent her squealing to the police. And while he's trying to placate this needy innocent girl, despite his inward disgust at her masochistic nature, he's trying to out-wit the local gang-boss, Collioni, and avoid the interfering meddling of Fred Hale's friend, Ida. The tone of the film should be menacing, unnerving, sometimes terrifying, but always taut. And running in the background is a debate about the nature of good and evil. Is Ida's simplistic categorisation of herself as good and Pinkie as evil, through and through, like the lettering in the stick of rock, true?  Or is Grace far more complicated and far more grand than her vulgar mind can fathom?

So how does Rowan Joffe's adaptation stack up? To start with the positive, it is a handsomely made film with beautifully observed production design. It takes us from the peeling walls of Kite's house via the faded grandeur of Ida's tea-rooms to the glossy, pretentious interiors of Collioni's Cosmpolitan hotel. DP John Mathieson's (ROBIN HOOD, GLADIATOR) photography captures that watery sunshine of the British sea-side and there is a beautifully lit climax on the cliffs. As for the acting, Andrea Riseborough (NEVER LET ME GO) is an effective Rose, making her delusional belief in Pinkie believable and heart-breaking. She is ably supported in the minor roles by a fine cast, with British actors of the quality of Phil Redmond (ANOTHER YEAR), Sean Harris (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE) and Steve Evets (LOOKING FOR ERIC) playing Spicer, Hale and Rose's father respectively. Moreover, there is an air of earnest respect and delicate care that overlays the entire project. Joffe claims he loves the novel and is respectful of the original film. Well, you can feel that.

And maybe that's the problem. Because this film just never takes off. It feels turgid. There is no pace, no sense of menace, and for all the nightmare visions of Pinkie at the end of a rope and scenes of Rose praying, no real sense of the stakes - whether literal or metaphysical. The film feels too safe, too sunlit, too designed somehow. It's as though the effort of getting the 1964 costume designs just right - the perfectly appointed suite in the Cosmpolitan Hotel - has resulted in a series of beautifully framed still shots. But where is the seedy menace of Greeneland? I simply wasn't scared of Sam Riley's Pinkie.

If we're looking for culprits, I guess the decision to set the film in 1964 rather than the late 30s would be one. The "pop" clothes and music, the mods and rockers, are a distraction, and far less menacing than the lurid clair-voyants and fair-gound freakishness of the original film. Maybe the youth angst theme is just to temporary - too situated - for a film about mortal sin. I also think some of the performances are too broad and perhaps the writing too reductive. Helen Mirren's Ida is shorn of the 1947 Ida's vulgarity. She comes off as a simplistic "tart with a heart" - and the use of these simplistic tropes is something I noticed, and disliked, in Rowan Joffe's script for the awful George Clooney thriller, THE AMERICAN. Andy Serkis' Collioni is a caricature - and maybe there is some sense in which those glamorous Italian mobsters are self-consciously caricatures - but you don't get the feeling that Joffe and Serkis are playing with that level of sophistication here. 

Just as some of the performances are very broad, the movie also has an incredibly intrusive over-worked orchestral score by Martin Phipps, never ceasing to bring out the Catholic material with its use of religious texts. In fact, the treatment of the movie's religious content is altogether reductive and crude.  Do we really need Pinkie's wooden bedroom to have the paint-stripped in just the pattern to reveal a cross? Do we really need Pinkie and Rose's first kiss to be shot from over-head, Pinkie holding her uncomfortably by the hands in a kind of martyred crucifix pose? Do we really need to see Rose in Church praying before an altar, shot from above the head of Christ? This ham-fisted handling of the religious content is best seen in his choice of final scene - the true test of any screenwriter claiming that he has adapted the book out of love. Admittedly, it was a test that Greene himself partly failed, but that is no excuse.

BRIGHTON ROCK played Toronto and London 2010 and will be released in the UK and Finland next Friday. It opens in Germany on April 21st.

Pantheon movie - BRIGHTON ROCK (1947)

This review reveals the plot of both the novel and the film.

Full disclosure: I am the cliché. I converted to Roman Catholicism at Oxford and transferred the zeal of the convert into an obsession with the writings of the two most famous Catholic converts - John Henry Newman (now on his way to Sainthood) and Graham Greene (whose works appeared on the now thankfully defunct Index Librorum Prohibitorum). Greene's honest portrayal of the difficulty of reconciling Catholicism with humanism - his rejection of simplistic certitude, even though that was what his Church seemed to demand of him - resonated deeply with me. And so, as many other readers, I started off, predictably, with his novels, especially the "Catholic novels" - Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter, Monsignor Quixote....It developed into a solid collection of literary criticism of Greene's work, thence into biographies and came full circle, reading Greene's superbly analytical criticism of others, not to mention his substantial body of film reviews. Finally, I came to the films. Of the works he scripted, THE THIRD MAN is simply untouchable and perfect. Taut, harsh, unsentimental. Of the films adapted from his novels, surely the greatest is the one he himself adapted (reworking Terence Rattigan's initial screenplay), The Boulting Brothers' 1947 version of BRIGHTON ROCK.

The novel was based in a world that Greene was fascinated by and closely observed - Brighton's underworld of black marketeers, Italian gangsters and sawdust bars. What was fascinating was the Greene depicted Brighton's public face as being no less vulgar, menacing and and disgusting than its underworld. Greene barely concealed his contempt for day-trippers looking for superficial, transient pleasures. Their faults are magnified in the character of Ida Arnold - a vulgar woman, completely of her time and locale. Ida drinks, flirts, visits clairvoyants, and has that complete and utter moral certainty and righteousness that fills the pages of the Daily Mail. She stands in contrast with Greene's anti-hero, the teenage gangster, Pinkie Brown. Pinkie Brown is a man out of time - by virtue of his Catholicism, which makes him "other" in Anglican England - but also because he is emotionally sterile - disgusted by sentiment and sex. He wanted to be a priest not because he felt a calling, but because he thinks that being a priest will allow him to live as a neuter - as nothing. This is the nihilistic outlook embodied in T.S.Eliot's early poetry.

The novel plays itself out as a battle between Ida's simplistic superficial morality and Pinkie's grander conception. He can be demonic, yes, but he also has grasped more firmly what true grace is, and so has a glimmer of a chance of something greater. Pinkie commits murder, but doesn't drink. He seduces the innocent young waitress, Rose, and marries her, simply to prevent her from giving evidence against him. He hates Rose because he hates her wilful naivety and because he finds her loving him absurd. It is absurd. But it is also frightening for him. Because, as in all sado-masochistic relationships, Pinkie realises that it's Rose who has the power. And so he tries to blot her out in the most complete manner - by making her commit suicide. He is not merely removing the threat to himself (the dead cannot give evidence), but removing her absolute faith. By tempting her into committing a mortal sin, he is killing innocence itself. Of course, the irritating, do-gooding interventions of Ida Arnold save Rose from suicide and damnation, and Pinkie is killed instead. But Pinkie is triumphant in the end. For the more charitable, the parish priest holds out the hope of grace and mercy, even for the murderer and seducer. For the less charitable, Pinkie's triumph is that he will ultimately destroy Rose's innocence from beyond the grave, thanks to a malicious recording he left her, telling her that he hates her. The end of the novel is utterly chilling. And for a novel that is widely seen as a "Catholic novel" it seems to dash away Hope and easy religious answers. There are no trite miracles. No easy fixes.

The Boulting Brothers' 1947 film of the novel is a tour-de-force of British noir - far surpassing their later social satires (LUCKY JIM, I'M ALRIGHT JACK) in visual style, if not in substance. From the opening chase scene, and the murder of Fred Hale, the movie is fast-paced and menacing. Brighton is menacing - both the grim under-world and the lurid sea-side attractions. DP Harry Waxman (THE WICKER MAN) and cameraman Gil Taylor (later DP on DR. STRANGELOVE) light everything with stark contrasts and frame scenes from unsettling angles. The point-of-view shots are un-nerving - often taking the audience through someone's hands to the scene beyond, as every scene is one of potential strangulation. That's how we first see Pinkie - a close-up on his hands playing with twine, as if to strangle. Richard Attenborough's performance as Pinkie is superlative - the contrast between his innocent baby-face (he was only 23 and looks 17) and the coolness with which he commits murder and the ease with which he picks up Rose. And, much as Greene reputedly didn't appreciate her performance, Hermione Baddeley is suitably crude and intrusive as Ida - an essential characteristic in confirming our sympathy for Pinkie, despite his heinous crimes.

There are two key changes from the novel. First, it's Catholic debate is essayed more lightly and subtly than in the book. But this is surely the right move. After all, without using an intrusive voice-over for internal monologue, it's hard to see how the Catholic angle could've been explored more explicitly without seeming heavy-handed. The second change is the ending. Where the novel has Rose walking home to listen to Pinkie's vicious record, the film ends with Rose in a convent, listening to a record which, thanks to a scratch that cuts short the monologue, allows her to believe that Pinkie did love her. Her Catholic faith is in tact, she can believe that she did "change him", and all this because of, we are supposed to believe, Divine Mercy. For years, I hated this ending, until I realised that actually one could choose to read it as the bitterest and most ironic ending of all. After all, is it more cruel that Rose has her illusions shattered, or that she lives on completely deluded? Still, this seems like a second-rate shabby sort of fix. Worst of all, one cannot blame Rattigan or the Boulting Brothers for this easier, more commercial ending, because it was Greene himself who changed it, apparently to appease the censors. Greene has been quoted as noting: "Anybody who had any sense would know that next time Rose would probably push the needle over the scratch and get the full message." I don't think that's right. I think you can't have it both ways. Either the end is sugary, or she is deluded. The evasion at the end weakens what is otherwise a sublime picture.

BRIGHTON ROCK was released in 1947.

THE THIRD MAN - a personal appreciation

What can I say about THE THIRD MAN that has not already been said by film critics of greater talent over the decades? It's the British film-noir par excellence and was recently named as the best British film ever made by the British Film Institute*. It picked up awards at Cannes and the Oscars on original release and is viewed by most cineastes as a must-have DVD. Just google the title and you'll come up with a wealth of erudite appreciation.

Well, perhaps I can add a point of information. A newly restored print of THE THIRD MAN is doing the rounds of art cinemas in the UK. As the movie was originally released in 1949, this is likely the first chance fans of the movie will have to see it on the big screen. And boy is it worth it. If ever a movie was made for a cinematic release it is THE THIRD MAN, with its Oscar-winning black and white expressionist photography - all sharp contrast and distorted camera angles.

The other thing I can add is a sort of personal appreciation - an explanation of why THE THIRD MAN is important to me. Years before I started hanging out with R.I.A.K.s** on an almost permanent basis, my only mental images of Vienna were those given to me by cinematographer Robert Krasker in THE THIRD MAN. It was the first movie I watched where I actually noticed the deliberate use of the camera, which I guess influenced the fact that I later studied cinematography rather than cinema history or anything more "soft". This was not your usual bland glossy Hollywood flick. Vienna was all shadowy cobblestone streets and filthy sewers, accompanied by that demented repetitive zither music from Anton Karas. When I finally made it to Vienna I was somewhat disappointed to find it was rather Habsburg Disney - all fairy snow or stunning sunshine. Of course, that didn't stop me scaring myself silly on rides at the Prater or taking the Third Man Tour of the Sewers. I did this about an hour before attending the Concordia Ball, much to my more civilised friends' bemusement.

But more importantly, for me THE THIRD MAN was one of the signposts along the way to growing up. By which I mean, the moment at which you stop thinking that James Bond is how spies are and that the world is essentially A-okay. To quote John le Carre: "I despise Bond. I despise the short answer to the perfectly made world." It started off with reading a lot of Graham Greene, who also wrote the script to THE THIRD MAN, because his sort of uncomfortable Catholicism fitted a lot better to my experience than the usual hagiography you're forced to read as a kid. Once you realise that a whisky priest - an alcoholic with a mistress - can be the Good Catholic Hero - all doors are open. And then I started reading John le Carre, mainly because he went to my old college and apparently one of the old tutors there used to recruit for MI5. Both Greene and le Carre write books about the way the world is, not how it might be in some Boys Own Adventure. And both have a great sense of the absurd. Both deal with the clash of ideology and pragmatism and those grey areas of morality. They also both knew Kim Philby, who was allegedly Greene's model for THE THIRD MAN's most famous character, Harry Lime.

Harry Lime, played in an outstanding cameo by Orson Welles, is a racketeer. A man who has no morality but a profit motive. He has made money in post-war Vienna by running goods from one side to the next and is really rather proud of his hard-headed pragmatism. He lays out his life philosophy in an infamous speech at the Prater: "Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." It's a sort of Satanic argument for meritocracy and the advance of man. Utterly chilling and yet very, very charming.

This is basically what Kim Philby was meant to be like. Kim was one of the "Cambridge Spies" who betrayed British and American secrets to the Russians from the 1930s up until the 50s, was it?, when Philby was caught and shipped off to Moscow. By this point he was very senior in the British secret service. Le Carre's take seems to be that Philby was basically on the make. In an interview, he said: "Philby had an innate disposition to deceive that preceded his Marxism. But his Marxism was a rationalisation, which came later. His deceitful nature derived from.....an over-whelming vanity about his own worth."

What does all this have to do with THE THIRD MAN? Well, for me, THE THIRD MAN is a story of a young man who comes to Vienna, to quote le Carre again, in the spirit of John Buchan and leaves it in the spirit of Kafka. The movie tells us how that happened. The hero of the story is Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) - a young innocent American writer of pulp fiction. He has been summoned by his old friend Harry Lime with the promise of employment, but he arrives to find Harry dead. Still, he is offered some work as a lecturer so hangs around, probing into the circumstances of his friend's demise. As he pokes around he hears several versions of the event and discovers that there is a Third Man who cannot be accounted for. To cut a long story short - SPOILER - Holly is disabused of his innocence and falls in love with Harry's old girlfriend who is entirely indifferent to him. He also, dramatically, finds that Harry faked his own death to escape the people after him.

Like I said, there are plenty of people who will tell you how great THE THIRD MAN is. They are not wrong, and any chance to see it on the big screen is not to be missed. For me it will always be the quintessential great film about the loss of innocence and about the charismatic nature of amorality. As a young kid of around twelve, this movie mapped out for me what the world was really about. As they say, the devil has all the best lines. Still, again to paraphrase le Carre, I'd rather be Holly's kind of fool, than Harry's.

*The British Film Institute's Top 20 British films list is: 1. The Third Man. 2. Brief Encounter. 3. Lawrence of Arabia. 4. 39 The 39 Steps (Hitckcock's version.) 5. Great Expectations. 6. Kind Hearts and Coronets. 7. Kes. 8. Don't Look Now. 9. The Red Shoes. 10. Trainspotting. 11. The Bridge on the River Kwai. 12. If...13. The Ladykillers. 14. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. 15. Brighton Rock. 16. Get Carter. 17. The Lavender Hill Mob. 18. Olivier's Henry V. 19. Chariots of Fire. 20. A Matter of Life and Death.

**Random Inter-changeable Austro-Krauts. (A friend of mine wishes a correction to Austro-Struedels. However, RIASs is less catchy.)

THE THIRD MAN originally showed at Cannes 1949 where it won the Grand Prize. It is currently on re-release in the UK in a shiny new print. The old print is available on DVD.

TRANSAMERICA - like CAPOTE and TSOTSI - a great central performance in a mediocre movie

There's not a whole lot I want to say about TRANSAMERICA. By now, with the Oscar hoopla over with, pretty much everyone knows that the movie contains a fantastic central performance from Felicity Huffman. Huffman plays a pre-operative trans-sexual who, on the eve of "her" gender re-assignment, discovers that she fathered a child. Posing as a religious worker, she picks up her son in New York and drives him cross country. Felicity Huffman's performance is one of subtlety and authenticity. I took a person who has never seen Desperate Housewives(!) to see this flick, and he did not twig that the trans-sexual, "Bree", was being played by a woman. However, I found the rest of the film chock-full of road-movie cliches, and something of a paint-by-numbers Indie film. It's all here: junkie, hustler teenage drifter son; wise Native American; mean and nasty middle-American mother....Perhaps the director felt that with such challenging core material, he had to situate Bree's story is a conventional genre movie. Alls I know is that while Huffman's on-screen persona is an act of award-worthy transformation, the movie itself was pretty mediocre and left me unimpressed and largely unmoved.

TRANSAMERICA premiered at Berlin 2005 and is currently on release in the US and UK. It hits France on April 26th 2006.