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The Boulting brothers’ 1947 version of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock stands as the great example of British film noir. Rowan Joffe’s new version, in cinemas this weekend, is more explicit in its evocation of the theme of faith. But to what effect?
G
raham Greene wrote the novel Brighton Rock (published 1938) midway through his time as film critic for The Spectator. He also
worked, as did Terence Rattigan, on the adap- tation for the Boulting brothers’ film version of 1947. The novel itself had demonstrated a strong cinematic sensibility. Pick a page at random and the description of a man selling objects from a tray on the street, for example, could break down in a shooting script into a mid-shot, a slow pan across and a cutaway with jarring sound montage. As J.M. Coetzee has noted in an introduction to the novel, touches of both Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock appear in the flashes of violence and quirks of plot. The book’s style leads easily to the expres- sionistic approach of the 1947 film with the young Richard Attenborough as baby-faced hoodlum, Pinkie Brown. Greene and Rattigan’s script along with Attenborough’s portrayal of Pinkie’s vicious volatility and betrayal of a naive girl, Rose (an unwitting witness to a crime), and Harry Waxman’s black-and-white cinematography, make this film the great example of British noir. Yet, the novel is laced also with a dual struggle: Pinkie and Rose are “Romans” and for them the defi- ance of the law is less important than damnation. There is a woman, Ida Arnold, a fleshy rationalist who is concerned to bring the young hoodlum to book. Her creed is that of justice. So the contest is Good and Evil ver- sus Right and Wrong. This makes Pinkie’s struggle darker and more spiritual even than that of Coppola’s young godfather Michael Corleone, closer perhaps to Harvey Keitel’s failed priest in Scorsese’s Mean Streets. The 1947 film, though, took a predominantly socio - logical slant. Its prologue spoke of gang warfare in Brighton between the wars: “dark alleyways and festering slums: the poison of crime and violence … that other Brighton, now happily no more”. The cinematic treatment of Greene’s novels is no small topic – much of his writing has
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made it to the screen. Two of the more suc- cessful were directed by Carol Reed and made, like Brighton Rock, in that post-war period that proved a glorious era for British film, namely The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949). Of the ostensibly “Catholic” novels (although Greene might have disliked to see them so segregated), The Power and the Glory became The Fugitive (1947) with Henry Fonda, directed by John Ford, while The Heart of the Matter (1953, director George More O’Ferrall) softens Greene’s ending although Trevor Howard’s colonial policeman convincingly conveys bleak intensity. That leaves The End of the Affair which has been tackled twice: in 1955, directed by Edward Dmytryk, a rather muddled version with Deborah Kerr and Van Johnson and more recently in 1999, when Neil Jordan adapted the screenplay and directed Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore through long dark nights of rain and agony, both spiritual and emo- tional.
And so to a new version of Brighton Rock,
directed by Rowan Joffe, whose recent script for the George Clooney film The American demonstrated an interest in redemption. Joffe decided to bypass the 1947 film and return instead to the novel but, crucially, to change the era in which the story is set from the late 1930s to 1964, when mods and rockers patrolled the Brighton seafront but a murderer still faced the noose. It is a fine-looking film with spectacular touches – an eerily lit clifftop sequence shot from a swooping crane, for example – but such style can sometimes give the whole fea- ture, even Pinkie’s sordid digs, an artificial sheen. A visit to racket boss Colleoni at his hotel is a clutch of visual clichés and anachro- nisms. There are the mini-skirted model girls (although the fashion was only just beginning) and what looks like an Eero Aarnio bubble chair (designed in 1968). Similarly, Rose, a teenager, is asked at one point if she is on the Pill and this in a notional time two years before a film like Alfie where pregnancy out of
Brighton Rock: Changed sensibility but lacking the audacity of the 1947 original
marriage was still a source of huge anxiety. None of this would matter if the drama were itself compelling and justified the change of era. As Pinkie, Sam Riley conveys a sullen nervousness and sexual neurosis that is cer- tainly more modern. The outstanding performance though is that of Andrea Riseborough as Rose. While she appears to have had the vitality washed out of her, her strength is knowing just what she does, sur- rendering her soul’s safety for love. As in Greene’s novel, Rose here has startling flashes of anger and determination. Helen Mirren as Ida is practical and purposeful; her con- versations with John Hurt as Phil Corkery provide a world-weary commentary for the action.
Although Joffe claims to have gone directly to the novel, he employs an ending almost identical to that of the Boulting brothers, a scene in which Rose is comforted by an illusion that Pinkie really loved her while the camera moves to a crucifix. The idea, presumably, is that Rose’s struggle with her grief will have the consolation of “the appalling strangeness of the infinite mercy of God” (albeit on a fragile premise) whereas Greene ends the novel with Rose about to discover cruel evidence of Pinkie’s indifference. The significance of that crucifix is not really earned in this new film, however, by any explor - ation of Rose’s faith or Pinkie’s fears in the preceding action. The Boulting brothers con- centrated on the gangster element and let the religion fend for itself to good effect. Here the question of faith is mainly made more explicit by having characters visit churches, which is not enough. Sadly, the stakes never feel that high for the action, either. Joffe has attempted to make a fresh version of a novel that pulled off what seemed at the time an audacious feat – that of marbling challenging ideas through a popular thriller. Cinema can achieve that too, but this is by no means the best example.
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