Features > Movie Reviews > Brighton Rock…

Save perhaps Emeric Pressburger: The Third Man, Fallen Idol, Went the Day Well, The Quiet American, The End of the Affair, for starters, and of course, his most famous novel Brighton Rock, written in 1938 and filmed by the Boulting Brothers in 1947.

A story about hoodlums, protection rackets, and tit-for-tat murders played out in the seafront pubs and cafes - not to mention on the pier - of one of the South’s favourite getaway spots. “This film should not be shown” concluded the critic for the Daily Mirror in a fit of post-war paranoia. The Boultings added a disclaimer to the opening titles, pointing out that the story took place in pre-war Brighton, before the Police stood up to the criminal element and that everything was hunky-dory now (or words to that effect). The film did roaring business, and as the vicious 17-year-old thug Pinkie Brown, 24-year-old Richard Attenborough became an overnight star.

It takes some nerve to revisit this territory, but for his first time directing a big theatrical feature, screenwriter Rowan Joffe could at least be sure of getting noticed. He’s hardly a newcomer of course. The son of Killing Fields director Roland Joffe, he’s already stacked up some impressive credits with the screenplays for Last Resort (set in Margate, if I remember rightly?), Gas Attack, 28 Weeks Later and The American. He also directed the TV movies Secret Life and The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall.

Joffe’s big idea is to update the story to 1964 – any later and you would lose the threat of the death penalty, as well as the gambling laws that allowed gangsters to thrive on protection money. It’s a period of social tumult: youth is beginning to assert itself, the pill is changing attitudes to sexual freedom and women’s place in society, and there is trouble brewing rival youth gangs the Mods and the Rockers.

More daringly, I think, he’s also adopted a retro, film noir stylization to tell the story, embracing the melodrama in Greene’s story and playing up the religious symbolism. So we get chiaroscuro lighting, swooping camera movements, vertiginous set ups (the DP is John Mathieson), and an old fashioned orchestral score by Martin Phipps, full of crashing crescendos and tremulous motifs… This is not a modern film language, and it’s something that might throw some audiences, but it seems to fit with the fetid atmosphere Greene evokes (in Brighton!) and the Dickensian gallery of overt “characters” he describes.

Joffe has rejigged the plotting ingeniously, so that, for example, the naïve teagirl Rose (Andrea Riseborough) is involved in the action more directly, and has cut out some of the coincidences. The aging good-time-girl Ida (a red haired Helen Mirren) who takes up the case of Pinky’s first murder is now Rose’s employer at Snow’s café.

Still, the heart of the matter is the nature of sociopath Pinkie (Sam Riley, from Control) and his toxic courtship of Rose, which is intended only to neutralize her as a potential witness against him. It’s here that Joffe’s film improves on John Boulting’s. Riley shows us a side of Pinkie that Attenborough couldn’t – a side that is attracted to, and even touched by, the innocence that Rose represents. In their first date, he cruelly pinches her arm – it’s straight from the novel – and she tells him if he likes, he can keep doing it – which of course stops him in his tracks. It’s a little sado-masochistic dance of attraction and repulsion, cruelty and kindness, and all wrapped up in a religious question about the nature of evil: is it as engrained as the word “Brighton” in a stick of rock, or are even the worst of us capable of change under the influence of love?

Riley and Riseborough offer insights into characters who have never experienced any, and Joffe has surrounded them with a richly entertaining supporting cast of spivs and chancers played by the likes of Andy Serkis (local bigshot Mr Colleoni), John Hurt (Ida’s louche mate Phil Corkery), and Sean Harris (the ill-fated Hale).

I’m not sure that Joffe pulls off the grand gutter operatics of the third act, but I enjoyed seeing him give it a go.