with a five star review in both the independent and guardian. new film London to Brighton might be the best british gangster film of all time??? but do you agree?

 

London to Brighton

 

(Cert 18)

 

Peter Bradshaw

Friday December 1, 2006

The Guardian

 

 

Best British film of the year ... London to Brighton

 

With little in the way of money, with a partly non-professional cast and with plenty of chutzpah, the young British film-maker Paul Andrew Williams has written and directed a cracking debut feature with enough clout to kick the door in. It's a cold-sweat gangland thriller with a twist of social realism, which pays intelligent homage to Mike Hodges and Ken Loach. By accident or design, traces of both Get Carter and Cathy Come Home are discernible.

 

There are London criminals here, wielding shotguns, but the film has none of the mockney geezer nonsense that we've come to expect from British films. It's a fast, fluent, picture that grasps a horrible truth which has never much interested Guy Ritchie or Matthew Vaughn - its violent criminal men, no matter how high up the food chain, are unglamorous inadequates, all afraid and ashamed of something. It is a world of insects feeding off smaller insects, and abuse victims becoming abusers but deserving zero sympathy in the process.

The film begins with an almighty crash, as street prostitute Kelly (Lorraine Stanley) and a 12-year-old called Joanne (Georgia Groome) bust into a graffiti-strewn public lavatory somewhere in London at 3am. Kelly's face is cut and bruised and she has a bulgingly livid black eye which has, horribly, added about a third to the size of her face. They are clearly terrified and hiding from someone, and Kelly tells her young companion that they must get the next train to Brighton, and quick. But who is after them?

 

The answer to this lies with Kelly's pimp, a contemptible slimeball called Derek who we see first wheedling and bullying one of his women - a tiny cameo from Claudie Blakley - into having sex with two men noisily waiting in the other room. She has to be obedient or Derek will lose face in front of the clientele. The woman's own face is already a mask of disgust and self-disgust. Derek's mobile rings and instantly it is his turn to cringe with fear. A dead-eyed mobster - Stuart Allen, played by Sam Spruell - summons Derek to a gruesome scene: the blood-drenched corpse of Stuart's ageing father Duncan. The old man was in the habit of requesting underage girls from Derek, who got Kelly to trawl the badlands around London rail stations, looking for homeless runaways to gratify Duncan's taste in green and unripe flesh. Kelly and her protegee were the last to see Duncan alive and Stuart orders Derek to find them, and so the chase down to Brighton is on.

 

Adroitly, Williams intercuts between the present scene and flashbacks, and the state of Kelly's face instantly tells you where you are on the timeline. Two questions reveal themselves: what have Kelly and Joanne done? And what is going to get done to them?

 

Sam Spruell's villain is dripping with contempt for the London underclass from whose needs he gouges his own filthy living and also for Derek, on whose services his father had come to rely. As he gives the order to Derek, he cuts the pathetic man's leg with a straight razor - off camera - to give a taster of what Derek might expect if he fails but also from a compulsive, sociopathic need to impose his mastery.

 

For the rest of the film, the limping Derek suffers from hysterical pain which only his fear and adrenaline can counteract. His agony suffuses the entire picture with this goosebump frisson of anxiety. Derek has many choice moments: his angry envy at the flash flat of a criminal from whom he borrows his shooter, and his abject response to having this same gun confiscated by one of Stuart's heavier-set goons: "Can I have it back later, please? It's not mine."

 

By contrast, the artless Joanne has an insouciant sort of courage, thrilled at her first sight of the sea at Brighton and at winning a teddy bear at the arcade. Meanwhile, Kelly is developing a maternal instinct, as she has sex with strangers to earn money for them both, though she has to offer a discount on account of her face. The expressions of her customers in their cars, and on Kelly's as she bounces grimly away, are a vision of purest hell. Like the criminals and villains, her customers are suffused with guilt and shame and weakness.

 

There are outstanding performances here from Lorraine Stanley, Georgia Groome and Johnny Harris, and also from Sam Spruell as the repulsive Stuart who, in his skin-crawling final encounter with Joanne, turns into his own hateful father before our very eyes. The journey from London to Brighton has become something else: a journey into the final circle of the inferno. Williams's film is a 120-degree proof thriller, with storytelling nous and technical flair: it's the best British film of the year.

The Long Good Friday by an absolute country mile

The Long Good Friday by an absolute country mile

 

I would second that

Here's my top 5 Brit Gangster films...

 

1. Get Carter (just so utterly iconic)

2. Long Good Friday

3. Gangster No 1

4. Performance

5. Dead Man's Shoes

Layer Cake for me :D