Book Review: Brighton Rock | The Pink Panther Snipes Again The Pink Panther Snipes Again Bad Movie Reviews with a Touch of Snark Book Review: Brighton Rock by jilliansheilas 2 Comments I almost bought a copy of this novel in Brighton, which would have been perfect, but I hated the cover. Apparently it’s a thing to have cartoony characters on the cover of this novel, which makes no sense because, in true Graham Greene fashion, the closest it comes to humor is bitterness. There are some spoilers in this review…but this novel is nearly 80 years old and has been made into 2 different movies. At a certain point you might want to just accept you’re never going to read it. Brighton Rock Graham Greene Total pages: 247 Important note: this is connected to another Graham Greene novel, A Gun for Sale. However, I maintain it’s really not necessary to read the other one before this. But who knows, I could be missing information that would bring new meaning to my reading of Brighton Rock. Other note: Brighton rock does not refer to a geological formation (as I believed for a really long time), but a candy stick you can buy in every. Single. Shop in Brighton.

The stick reads “Brighton rock” on both ends and all the way through. Exhibit A Our story follows the leader of a 1930s Brighton gang in the aftermath of a murder. Pinkie Brown is a cold, ruthless 18-year-old psychopath whose grey eyes give “an effect of heartlessness like an old man’s in which human feeling has died.” (God damn, Graham Greene.) Following the murder of his gang leader, Pinkie is in charge of those loyal enough to remain, and his first order of business is vengeance. Pinkie’s target is Fred Hale, a man who betrayed the gang leader in some way, presumably (I can’t claim I understand how gangs work at all). Just before Fred’s murder (spoiler, but I don’t think Fred even makes it to page 30), he encounters the easy-going Ida, whose bosom is described in virtually every chapter. When Fred disappears, Ida is extremely suspicious and refuses to rest until she discovers the truth about what’s happened. As Ida pursues Pinkie, Pinkie pursues Rose, a teenager who unknowingly holds a key piece of evidence that could implicate Pinkie in murder.

Even though the idea of romance is utterly repellent to Pinkie and he sees the traditional path of marriage and children as a slow death, he convinces Rose he loves her in order to dissuade her from talking to anyone about what she knows. Is he willing to sacrifice his “bitter virginity” (whatever the fuck that means), his freedom, and even his eternal soul in order to keep Rose quiet? Like basically every other Graham Greene novel ever written, this one is highly critical of the Catholic Church. Pinkie and Rose are both Catholic, in contrast with Ida, who isn’t religious but spiritual and has a few weird superstitions about ghosts and Ouija boards. As a child, Pinkie wanted to be a priest, and Greene draws parallels between his contempt for the rest of humanity, indifference to suffering, and disdain of sex and romantic love with the Catholic Church. Greene also prods quite a bit at the two Catholic characters’ willingness to sin despite the promise of eternal damnation, going so far as to say “a Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone” (246).

(Ha ha, since this isn’t an English paper, I can end this paragraph with a quote and refuse to offer any explanation whatsoever!) For some reason I didn’t get into his the first time around I tried it, but I LOVED it this time. It’s outrageously cynical, and the only novel I can think of in which a candy tourists buy in Brighton is used as a metaphor for the inescapability of human nature. Fair warning that you’ll have to deal with a reasonable amount of dated ‘30s slang that feels made up, esp. re: women. (Both “buer” and “polony” get thrown around A LOT and I still don’t fully understand what either means. I just kept thinking of Polonius from Hamlet and also Thelonious Monk every time someone used the word “polony.”) The end also gets a bit melodramatic, and it’s hard not to imagine physically throwing Rose. She’s an idiot. Most frustrating is that Ida, the only likeable character, gets quite a lot of focus at the beginning of the novel, but then Pinkie receives more and more attention.

I was so excited when I thought (however briefly) this was actually a female-centric Greene novel. My favorite quote is also a good test of whether you might enjoy this one or find it too dark and cynical: “That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape––anywhere––for anyone? It was worth murdering a world” (92). Chills, you guys. 5/5 Pink Panther Heads The Spectator’s review on the back of the book says of Greene, “Entertaining he may always be; comforting, never,” which I think is the most accurate description of his novels I’ve ever read. (And at the same time seems a bit like backhanded praise and also possibly written by Yoda?) I can’t think of another writer quite like Greene; perhaps Cormac McCarthy in terms of bleakness? John Le Carré in terms of suspense and a darker take on spying (as in The Quiet American)? William Golding for shared views on human nature? He’s not quite like any other writer I can think of, which is why I love him so much.

Btw, there’s apparently a 1947 film version that scandalized the nation for being too violent, which I cannot WAIT to see. Share this: Sun, sea and sexual deviance: the British noir thriller of the long 1930s - Charteris - 2015 - Critical Quarterly - Wiley Online Library Sun, sea and sexual deviance: the British noir thriller of the long 1930s Authors Standard PDF (103.1 KB) From London in the thirties we used to roar down to the coast in fast sports cars, or if we were hard up, ten bob would buy a week-end return. The main rendezvous was the Star of Brunswick pub in Hove, outside which Rolls-Royces, Daimlers and MGs were parked far up the street. There was also the New Pier Tavern, long since gone, with its noisy honky-tonk piano, thick atmosphere of tobacco and sprinkling of red-coated, pink-faced guardsmen, and sailors from Portsmouth. […] In 1935 and 1936 the annexe to the Old Ship Hotel was always full.

Few chauffeurs used it, but at week-ends the cubicle bedrooms were packed.[ 1 ] – John Montgomery, Gay News, 1973 While the noir thriller is typically conceived of as an American genre, it has been suggested that a case might be made for a seminal British noir which, while perhaps neither so coherent nor so prolific as its American cousin, had nonetheless ‘its own energies and distinctiveness, providing a vehicle for the exploration of the social and sexual discontents that bubbled under the surface of British life’.[ 2 ] Such a case is yet to emerge.

A genre characterised, from its accepted roots in 1930s hard-boiled fiction, by its urban locale, the noir thriller presents a city divided as much by knowledge as by wealth, a spatial contrast that augments ‘the thriller's central sense of a double world, at once poetic and prosaic, mysterious and mundane’.[ 3 ] The city's constituent spaces function as physical manifestations of epistemological and socio-economic inequalities, but also as sites of overlap, facilitating ‘promiscuous interactions among the city's diverse strangers’ in a permissive environment that finds ‘the inscribed boundaries between the races, sexes, and classes dissolved’.[ 4 ] Given the fundamental role of the metropolis to the genre, I would suggest that the ‘energies and distinctiveness’ of a peculiarly British noir might depend upon – and be best understood through – a uniquely British spatial correlative to the depression-era urban wasteland of American noir.

A similarly doubled wold, with – as John Montgomery's memories of the queer haunts of 1930s Brighton suggest – its own unique sites, ‘the British seaside resort has been a distinct and distinctive entity’[ 5 ] throughout the twentieth century, and an awareness of its narrative function is, I believe, crucial to any account of the social and psycho-sexual tensions that energise two British noir thrillers of the long 1930s – Graham Greene's Brighton Rock (1938) and Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square (1941). The term ‘noir thriller’ is adopted here in order to couple Martin Rubin's characterisation of the thriller as ‘a quantitative as well as a qualitative concept’[ 6 ] with Lee Horsley's account of noir as a distinct set of intensifying narrative strategies.

For Rubin, the thriller is an aesthetic of excess, an accumulation of conflicting and contradictory properties which, tellingly, finds its spatial analogue amidst the attractions of the pleasure-beach: ‘Just as a roller coaster makes us laugh and scream, the thriller often works to double emotions, feelings, sensations: humour and suspense, fear and excitement, pleasure and pain’.[ 7 ] It is a parallel exploited to dizzying effect by the sensational ghost-train sequence that frames Fred Hale's murder in John Boulting's film adaptation of Brighton Rock (1947). What pervades the thriller is thus a ‘sense of being carried away, of surrendering oneself. Control-vulnerability is a central dialectic of the thriller, closely related to sadism-masochism.’[ 8 ] Literary noir accentuates and complicates these characteristics through its deployment of narrative strategies that privilege characterisation as a mode of social critique.

Yet what follows is not simply an exercise in literary typology: neither Brighton Rock nor Hangover Square are typical noir thrillers, but I locate both novels within this tradition in order to facilitate an exploration of how they participate not only thematically but structurally in what Lara Feigel identifies as a ‘1930s […] art of excess, situated at the seaside’.[ 9 ] This art exceeded its temporal limits no less than any others, tales of sex and violence at the 1930s British coast emerging well into the 1940s and beyond. Indeed, as has been suggested by Janet Montefiore, a fuller account of 1930s literature might be achieved by including, alongside those texts completed and published between 1930 and 1939, those which ‘shift the definition of “thirties writing” from “writing in the thirties” to “writing about the thirties”’[ 10 ] by dint of both being – in terms of content – and yet not being – in terms of dissemination – of the 1930s.

Extending what Marina MacKay terms ‘the concept of aboutness’[ 11 ] in this way allows us to consider Greene's Brighton Rock (set, written and published in the 1930s) alongside Hamilton's Hangover Square, which, like Julian Maclaren-Ross's Of Love and Hunger (1947), ‘dates back to […] pre-war days on the south coast’ and thus ‘belongs to a recognisable genre of thirties fiction’[ 12 ] despite being published in the 1940s. The same is true of the screenplay of Brighton Rock and its final realisation in 1947.

As Montefiore notes: ‘To read the literature of and about the 1930s in terms of memory – as opposed to the more conventional emphasis on witness – thus inevitably blurs the neat traditional boundaries of that decade’.[ 13 ] The prewar British seaside would loom large in the memories of Greene and Hamilton long beyond these traditional boundaries, Hamilton returning to it for the setting of The West Pier (1951), whilst Greene, many years later, would recall of 1930s Brighton: ‘No city before the war, not London, Paris or Oxford, had such a hold on my affections’.[ 14 ] He would also complain of the obliviousness of commentators to the realities of coastal life: ‘Some critics have referred to a strange violent “seedy” region of the mind […] which they call Greeneland, and I have sometimes wondered whether they go round the world blinkered’.[ 15 ] For, while he grudgingly admitted that ‘the setting of Brighton Rock may in part belong to an imaginary geographic region’,[ 16 ] the novel's noir world is as much a product of observation as imagination, Greene depicting a resort such as that outlined by historian John Walton,

 characterised no less by ‘alternative versions of seaside experience’[ 17 ] than by more selective, picture-postcard versions: The […] earthy seediness of the less glamorous levels of the entertainment industry; the violence of gangs and protection rackets in places where a high throughput of visitors seeking services on or beyond the fringes has established lucrative and tempting markets for the providers; the poverty amidst plenty endured by those for whom seaside employment is intermittent, unorganised, patronage-dependent and ill-paid …[ 18 ] This double world offered Greene and Hamilton ‘a setting where […] the genteel, controlled, symmetrical front of the resort finds itself invaded by the disorder, untidiness and misrule of the back’.[ 19 ] In so doing, it provided a spatial realisation of the noir protagonist's fragile psyche, a physical manifestation of ‘the violence and savagery lurking beneath a seeming peace’.[ 20 ] It is a striking parallel that critics have been hesitant in drawing.

Horsley does note the liminal nature of noir subjectivity, describing characters analogous to Greene's Pinkie Brown and Hamilton's George Harvey Bone as ‘men who cross over into a zone in which normal civilised inhibitions no longer apply.’[ 21 ] For Horsley, however, this crossing is ostensibly figurative, as her characterisation of the danger-zone as ‘the “other side” of a boundary’[ 22 ] implies, her punctuation emphasising the metaphorical status of these spatial terms. She makes no attempt to map the mental topography of these peculiarly British protagonists onto the peculiarly British physical topography they inhabit. Conversely, while Feigel identifies the ‘madness of the coast’[ 23 ] in the 1930s, she never explicitly aligns the possibilities of coastal geography with those of the individual psyche. Yet these very possibilities derive from ‘the consensually liminal nature of the seaside as “place on the margin,” where land and sea meet’,[ 24 ] and those who are figuratively marginalised find themselves literally on the edge.

Here, ‘the usual constraints on behaviour are suspended, however provisionally, to give a broader acceptability to or at least tolerance of, variety of sexual partners and practices, or unscheduled bodily exposure, or drink-fuelled raucousness, ribaldry or indelicacy, or the consumption of greasy food with the fingers in the public street’.[ 25 ] The seaside resort renders literal the spatial metaphor, putting ‘the “civilising process” temporarily in reverse’ and invoking ‘the spirit of carnival, in the sense of upturning the social order and celebrating the rude, the excessive, the anarchic, the hidden and the gross’,[ 26 ] potentially as dangerous as it is pleasurable. And yet, this potential for danger has, historically, been limited by self-regulation, Walton arguing that ‘people brought their own internal controls and assumptions about proper behaviour with them […] but the seaside provided a changed register of expectations, freer but still bounded by wider notions of respectability and propriety’.[ 27 ] Brighton Rock and Hangover Square chart the failures of such regulation, illustrating the consequences should these ‘internal controls’ be either untaught or suspended.

Their noir protagonists not only occupy or frequent the liminal space of the 1930s seaside, they are also liminal subjects, figures in transition, psychologically and developmentally ‘betwixt and between the categories of ordinary social life’.[ 28 ] This is complicated, I would argue, by the fact that, while the transition from a liminal to a socially stable state conventionally depends upon the subject's renewed adherence to behavioural norms, the solutions offered by Greene and Hamilton are in fact characterised by non-normative sexuality. It has been asserted that, in Greene's thrillers, it is not only the criminal but ‘even at times the socially inept or untutored’ individual who proves ‘inimical to the group's common good’,[ 29 ] a claim that registers in the ill-fated relationship between protagonist and society a specifically pedagogic failure.

It is this failure, in the face of the educative possibilities of the permissive seaside setting, that prevents both Greene's and Hamilton's protagonists from achieving social stability: since, as Kaye Mitchell argues, the ‘masculine genres’ of popular fiction, including the thriller, ‘suggest that masculinity is something that has to be learnt’[ 30 ] rather than conferred, a failure in education represents a bar to manhood. Greene asserts: ‘The Pinkies are the real Peter Pans – doomed to be juvenile for a lifetime’.[ 31 ] While he goes on to explain the consequences of such a fate, he leaves its causes for us to infer. For the Pinkie, it is the loss of gang-leader Kite as his mentor that interrupts and arrests his transition from boyhood to manhood. The pair's first meeting, of which we learn only latterly, marks a pivotal stage in the boy's development. Lying alone on his bed at No. 63 soon after his wedding, Pinkie recalls: This was the place he had come to after Kite had picked him up – he had been coughing on the Palace Pier in the bitter cold, listening to the violin wailing behind the glass.

Kite had given him a cup of hot coffee and brought him here – God knows why – perhaps because he was out and wasn't down, perhaps because a man like Kite needed a little sentiment like a tart who keeps a Pekinese. Kite had opened the door of No. 63 and the first thing he'd seen was Dallow embracing Judy on the stairs and the first thing he had smelt was Frank's iron in the basement.[ 32 ] Separated from his social context – from the heteronormative order of a home in the tellingly named Paradise Place – Pinkie's liminality is symbolised spatially by his position on the pier, a precarious venue ‘betwixt and between’ land and sea. Occupying its planks ‘in the bitter cold’, he is peculiarly out of sync with the seasonal cycle of seaside life, reflecting his suspension between states. An enigmatic figure, Kite is conspicuously absent from, but nonetheless central to, the lives of two Greene protagonists, Raven of the earlier A Gun for Sale (1936) admitting to the murder for which Pinkie seeks vengeance.

Yet it is possible to build a picture of his relationship with Pinkie through Greene's evocation of what Eve Sedgwick terms ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically’.[ 33 ] Indeed, Kite's is an identity born of ellipsis, of a single, tantalising ‘gap’ within Raven's narrative, as he declares: ‘“No one will hear any more about Kite. But if I was to tell you –” he ran away from the revelation.’[ 34 ] This curtailment is replicated in the pauses that sandwich the ‘God knows why’ of Pinkie's musings, pauses which invite speculation, for what Raven will not ‘tell’ is everywhere implicit. The encounter on the pier is itself telling, Greene's vocabulary – Pinkie recalls being ‘picked up’ by Kite – suggesting that the elder man's ‘sentiment’ is sexually motivated, ‘to pick up’ being synonymous with ‘to engage the sexual services of, to proposition’ in British slang.

Indeed, earlier in Brighton Rock marked-man Fred Hale seeks a woman to shield him from Pinkie's gang, consoling himself with the thought that ‘there must be hundreds waiting to be picked up on a Whitsun holiday’ (p.10), while the phrase recurs in Hangover Square as Netta Longdon explains the stranger who has unexpectedly crashed George's weekend alone with her in Brighton: ‘We just picked him up. We all got blind at lunch-time and just picked him up.’[ 35 ] There is no ambiguity here, George realising, as he overhears the pair enter a hotel room together: ‘There must have been an understanding between them from the beginning’ (p.157). The site of Kite's meeting with Pinkie is equally suggestive.

Hamilton would term Brighton's West Pier ‘a sex battleship’[ 36 ] in his 1951 thriller, declaring it ‘intimately and intricately connected with the entire ritual of “getting off”’.[ 37 ] An epithet as accurately applied to the Palace Pier – the destination sought by Hale and Ida Arnold, the site of Pinkie's first ‘date’ with Rose Wilson – within the context of Kite's encounter with Pinkie, it resonates with the queer connotations of cruising. Pinkie's subsequent comparison of the gang-leader to ‘a tart’ supports this queer reading, not only suggesting a lapse in gender, but denoting deviant sexuality. This combines, on the pair's arrival at No. 63, with the gender role reversal implicit in Judy cheating on her husband as he does the ironing, to frame No.

63 as a heterotopia, a Foucauldian ‘counter-site’ or ‘effectively enacted utopia’ at once within and beyond the sites of a given culture, in which they ‘are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’.[ 38 ] As such, it is a microcosm of 1930s Brighton itself, a town ‘on the margins of the orderly sphere of “good governance” which reigned over other parts of the nation’[ 39 ] and thus, as Montgomery's recollections demonstrate, permissive of and ‘even conducive […] to lapses in normative behaviour’.[ 40 ] A ‘heterotopia of deviation’[ 41 ] in Michel Foucault's terms, No.

63 is occupied by and open only to those willing to privilege the demands of homosociality, to maintain the fluency between the poles of what Sedgwick terms ‘the continuum […] extending over the erotic, social, familial, economic and political realms […] of male homosocial and homosexual bonds’.[ 42 ] To put it another way, under Kite, the continuum that Sedgwick identifies between ‘men loving men’ and ‘men promoting the interests of men’[ 43 ] is less radically disrupted at No. 63 than elsewhere. It is no coincidence that Pinkie is stirred to reminiscence as he lies on his bed – Kite's bed, since ‘they had all had tiny rooms but Kite, and he had inherited that’ (p.127) – the bedroom serving as the epicentre of a heterotopia within which the erotic and educative functions of mentorship are thus reconciled. Pinkie's capacity for ‘sensual rage’ (p.53) clearly predates his initiation into Kite's world, but it is an impotent rage, its vehicles but ‘nails and splinters’ (p.54), until that point. No.

63 allows him the liberty to express his sadistic tendencies, Kite serving as mentor and conduit but also as authoritarian, a guard against the most dangerous ambiguities of this liberty. The sadomasochistic potentialities inherent in this paradoxical relationship are implicit in Pinkie's understanding of sex and violence not only as protocols that must be learned, each inextricable from the other and from the attainment of manhood, but as pedagogical tools in and of themselves, a vocabulary of pedagogy persisting throughout the novel to illustrate the rupture of Kite's removal. Without Kite, No. 63 – and, indeed, Brighton – loses its ‘precise and determined function’[ 44 ] as educative heterotopia, Rose's entry into the house marking the incursion of heteronormativity: ‘Everything had been of a piece: nothing had really changed […] until she came and altered everything’ (p.238). Faced with consummating the marriage, Pinkie actively avoids the house, with ‘the sense of playing truant from his proper work – he should be at school, but he hadn't learned his lesson’ (p.194).

And, while he experiences a temporary sense of empowerment in the fumbled act itself, envisioning himself as master to Rose's neophyte – reiterating that they have committed a mortal sin, he glances ‘at the made bed as if he contemplated a repetition of the act there and then – to thrust the lesson home’ (p.232) – he finds himself ultimately suspended in liminal unknowing: ‘He had thought he'd learned everything, but he was back now in his state of appalled ignorance’ (p.235). Pinkie's reliance upon Kite is demonstrative of what John Kucich terms a central ‘paradox of sadomasochism, in which the cruelty of an omnipotent figure […] can be both an expression of domination and a narcissistically reparative gift of safety, love, and attachment’,[ 45 ] a fact registered in Greene's extension of the scholastic simile to explain Pinkie's turn towards Dallow after Kite's death: ‘He felt as a physically weak but cunning schoolboy feels who has attached to himself in an indiscriminating fidelity the strongest boy in the school. “You mug,” he said and pinched Dallow's arm.

It was almost like affection’ (p.61). Yet, as this example and the later post-coital scene with Rose imply, Pinkie's behaviour is also a means by which he might identify with Kite's status. ‘Kite had died,’ Pinkie reflects, ‘but he had prolonged Kite's existence – not touching liquor, biting his nails in the Kite way’ (p.238), and this, in the absence of a restraining hand, adds to his menace. Such scenes demonstrate how the ‘complex dynamics of identification and vicarious empowerment that sadomasochism makes possible’[ 46 ] enact the dialectic of control and vulnerability that Rubin deems typical of the thriller, its tidal rhythms serving as the structuring principle of British seaside noir. Oscillating between city and shore, Hangover Square makes overt this tidal structure, explicitly aligning what George terms ‘his “dead” moods’ (p.15) – the periods of psychic dislocation during which he is at once at his most dangerous and his most vulnerable – with the excesses permitted by the liminal seaside locale.

From the first, George's precarious mental state is reflected in his physical location, the novel opening as he realises ‘he was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton, on Christmas afternoon, and the thing had happened again. […] On his left, down below, lay the vast grey sweep of the Wash under the sombre sky of Christmas afternoon: on his right the scrappy villas in the unfinished muddy roads’ (pp.16–17). Positioning his protagonist not only at the margin of land and sea but also at ‘the turn of the year’ (p.19) – and the temporal rupture of what would prove a ‘prolonged 1939’[ 47 ] at that – Hamilton drives home the precariousness attendant upon George's schizophrenia by taking as objective correlative a liminal site familiar from Greene's noir landscape: ‘The little pier, completely deserted, jutted out into the sea, its silhouette shaking against the grey waves, as though it trembled with cold but intended to stay where it was to demonstrate some principle’ (p.20).

George's dreamlike state, in which there is ‘no sensation, no pleasure or pain’ (p.17) – no internal controls analogous to those that regulate Walton's well-adjusted day-trippers – recedes only as he moves inland, crossing a clearly demarcated boundary: ‘it had happened again […] as he carried his bag […] along the platform of the little seaside terminus. It had happened at the barrier, as he offered his ticket to be clipped by the man’ (p.20). While George is more lucid in the periods between his ‘dead’ moods, he is no more socially adept. A figure living a half-life – an ‘only half-conscious volition’ (p.103) motivating his actions; no more than ‘half a mind’ (p.244) to do anything – he is the ‘inept or untutored’ other, his development, despite his thirty-four years, arrested ‘betwixt and between’ boyhood and manhood, as much as a result of an educative failure as of his pre-existing mental condition.

Hamilton, like Greene, adopts the scholastic simile to suggest this rupture, George behaving ‘like a little boy saying his lesson’ (p.66) in his interactions with Netta, while the stranger with whom she wrecks George's plans in Brighton is figured as ‘the school-bully’ (p.150). The comparison is developed in a brief but poignant episode in the novel's Eighth Part, in which an outside observer is introduced for a single chapter, with no other purpose than to accentuate George's boy-like qualities. The newcomer, a ‘young man of eighteen of the name of John Halliwell’ (p.205), is fascinated by Netta's circle and, ‘impressed merely by their age and maturity’ (p.206), experiences ‘much the same sensations, half-hating, half-admiring, as a new boy at a public school might feel on observing the antics of the “bloods”’ (p.207). Unexpectedly encountering George alone, he sees a chance to ‘establish contact as a whole with this most intriguing senior-form in the school of life’ (p.208). He is disappointed.

While the pair hit it off, Halliwell is disconcerted by George's ‘naive, simple, subdued tone’ (p.208), the man appearing to him strangely ‘like a child’ (p.208): ‘He had expected to have talked with someone older, harder, more mature than himself, but young as he was, he had a feeling of having talked to someone younger, less hard, and though more knowledgeable even less mature than himself’ (p.211). For George as for Pinkie this developmental arrest results from the sudden withdrawal of homosocial mentorship. George is freed from the strictures of normative behaviour on his departure from formal education, in what, with hindsight, the shrewd and sensitive Johnnie Littlejohn terms the ‘release from meaningless discipline’, and ‘the prospect of earthly pleasures and an independent existence’ (p.97). George is characteristically slow to test his freedom, the realisation that ‘life was opening out and wasn't school any more’ (p.56) coming to him only latterly, under the supervision of mentor Bob Barton: Bob ‘had given him the strength and vision to make the mental leap.

[…] But all that was gone […] for good, and he would never feel like that again’ (p.56). A figure, like Kite, most notable for his physical absence from the narrative, Bob wields a ‘curious influence’ over George, Johnnie recollecting: ‘Whenever they were together George had been […] more alive, talkative, confident, happy’ (p.99). The relationship between the pair, though seemingly more benign than that between Kite and Pinkie, is characterised nonetheless by a dynamics of identification and vicarious empowerment, George having ‘sunned himself in the friendship which Bob had generously yet unthinkingly bestowed’ (p.99). It is precisely the unthinking generosity of Bob's tutelage that leaves George vulnerable in its wake, Johnnie reflecting, ‘Bob had unwittingly done George a very bad service, indeed a permanent damage perhaps, by going to America like that’ (p.99). George is left, to all appearances, ‘too simple and direct in a hard and complicated world’ (p.99) peopled by more mercenary characters than Bob's.

Without Bob, George's need for validation leaves him open to abuses by Netta, ‘devoid of amiability and generosity’ (p.44). A sadistic femme fatale ‘encouraged in her insolence, hardness and tyranny by the power of her beauty and the slavishness in others it inspired’ (p.74), Netta makes a ‘slave’ (p.47) of George where Bob made a student.

The risks of exposing so willing a subservience to those of an exploitative nature surface regularly in the petty cruelties of George and Netta's London routine, but they acquire a peculiar intensity in Brighton – Hamilton's ‘London-by-the-Sea’ (p.141) – since, with ‘the structuring elements of everyday life removed or destabilised and the primacy of enjoyment and adventurousness in Brighton, the bases on which judgements could be formed were eroded: people would spend more, more impulsively and take more risk’.[ 48 ] The prospect of a weekend with Netta in ‘a seaside town with a reputation’ (p.139) certainly overrules George's better judgement, his doubts: ‘Was she, perhaps, just a common little schemer playing him up just to get some money out of him?’ (p.139). Pushing the idea aside, he reflects with an ominousness patent, apparently, only to the reader: ‘The point was […] she had promised to stay in Brighton with him alone […] and […] anything might happen’ (p.140).

The trip is envisioned as a re-enactment through which George might emulate his former mentor, choosing ‘to stay at the Little Castle […] because this was where he had stayed with Bob Barton in the Bob Barton days’ (p.142). But these are not the Bob Barton days, and without him, Brighton is ‘no good’ (p.245). The anticipated pleasures of a permissive heterotopia turn to dust as George is subjected to the humiliation of entertaining Netta in company with London-crony Peter and ‘a nasty-looking piece of work’ (p.150) they have picked up in transit. Forced to endure the ‘torture’ (p.173) of listening as Netta and her ‘pick-up’ have sex next-door, Hamilton's emasculated protagonist is driven from the hotel to walk the rain-soaked seafront, hit as he leaves by the ‘snap in his head’ (p.161) that marks the onset of a ‘bout of “dead” moods, the worst he had ever had’ (p.214).

George's ‘exposure’ (p.165) at Brighton – to the elements as much as to the ‘strain and horror’ (p.214) of Netta's unbridled brutality – incapacitates him physically as well as mentally, resulting in influenza. But in doing so, it also offers an alternative to his spiralling sexual obsession. Michael Walker, outlining noir character-types, highlights ‘the domestic woman: a wife or girlfriend who is in opposition to the femme fatale, associated with the home and offering the hero love, understanding and nurturing’.[ 49 ] Hamilton, I would argue, at once adopts and queers this trope, setting Johnnie in opposition to Netta as a means by which George might progress to a socially stable state. An old friend reunited with George shortly before the Brighton fiasco by a chance encounter in Soho, Johnnie nurses George through his sickness: ‘Johnnie was the only one who came to see him: he […] came every night until he was up again’ (pp.214–15).

Moreover, he not only offers understanding, suggesting George leave his lodgings to escape Netta's hold, he also proposes a viable alternative: ‘You'd better come and live with me’ (p.217). For Johnnie, the continuum between ‘men loving men’ and ‘men promoting the interests of men’ is uninterrupted, his ‘desire to set up house’ (p.219) with George positioning him as the domestic other of Walker's generic triangle, in which sex alone is dangerous and destructive, while love is potentially reparative – opening George's eyes to ‘sources of intimacy’ (p.121) beyond Netta, Johnnie's continued presence proves ‘a healing thought’ (p.122). Pulled between Netta and Johnnie, George is eventually drawn back into the danger-zone, travelling to Brighton under the misapprehension that Netta and Johnnie are there together.

Hamilton demarcates the spatial boundary beyond which he cannot guarantee his protagonist's safety or his agency: ‘Approaching Brighton in the darkness the train slowed down, hesitated, seemed to be feeling its way before risking itself in a dangerous area, and then lolloped oilily and methodically forward’ (p.246). George's suspicions apparently confirmed, he is again driven onto the seafront in the rain, determined to ‘run away, though there was nowhere to run to, and no one to whom he could run’ (p.250). Turning up a side street – away from the margin – he encounters Johnnie: Johnnie came up to him, a look of concern on his face. ‘What's the matter, old boy?’ he said. ‘Is anything the matter?’ And Johnnie put out his hands, and touched him, held him. ‘What's the matter, old boy?’ he said. He knew at once he was going to cry. It was the firm touch of his old friend's hand, the sincere, concerned face, the old voice, calling him ‘old boy’ in the old way. ‘Oh, Johnnie, Johnnie!’ he said, and began to cry.

‘Johnnie …’ Johnnie held him closer, drew him into the wall, hid him, like a mother with a child, from passers-by. ‘What's the matter, old boy?’ he said. (p.251) In the novel's only scene of physical intimacy, Brighton's permissive atmosphere finally works to George's advantage, the sight of two men embracing at length in the shadows drawing little attention. Johnnie's ‘firm touch’ and deepening embrace solidify his role as a source of unwavering, yet unobtrusive, homosocial support, George registering only after several minutes that ‘Johnnie still held him’ (p.252). Hamilton's comparison of Johnnie to ‘a mother with a child’ suggests an innate investment, on Johnnie's part, in George's future, implicitly characterising his support as recuperative in the short term, but also developmental in the long: if, as George believes, ‘the Johnnies’ of the world are ‘in one level of life – he in another’ (p.249), a queer union with Johnnie beyond Brighton might enable him to pass from one status to the other, achieving a mature masculinity.

In positioning Johnnie as a redemptive figure, Hamilton subverts the ideological charge of Walker's generic triangle. Stability, Hamilton implies, lies not in privileging heteronormativity – union with the domestic woman – over non-normative desire – sexual obsession with the femme fatale – but in recognising that the qualities associated with the domestic woman might be found elsewhere. Like Walker, Frank Krutnik suggests that the noir thriller bolsters heteronormativity, arguing that masculinity in these narratives must be ‘consolidated and perpetually protected against various forms of deviance’[ 50 ] and yet this is not the sense we derive from Hangover Square, in which Johnnie's queer attachment to George – itself deviant by the standards of 1930s Britain – is offered as a protection against a corrupting heterosexual other. In Brighton Rock too, heteronormativity is rejected as a means of achieving a secure adult masculinity, Pinkie's marriage figuring as ‘a trap’ (p.189) which binds him in ignorance, since it binds him both to Rose – a child herself, ‘green’ (p.53) and thus of no educative value – and to Brighton.

In a world after Kite, a world in which to have ‘moved on’ is to have ‘grown up’ (p.174), the potential for growth and stability might be glimpsed only beyond the margin, in the homosocial cooperative of Spicer's symbolically described Nottingham retreat, ‘the “Blue Anchor” in Union Street. A free house’ (p.102). If the British seaside resort is frequently figured as a ‘timeless’[ 51 ] space, its clock would appear to have stopped, for many, on or around 1 September 1939. Its physical development, much like that of London's Soho, ‘halted and fossilised’[ 52 ] by the outbreak of war, the interwar seaside continued to hold sway over the imaginations of a group of writers – among them Greene and Hamilton, but also George Orwell, Julian Maclaren-Ross and others – relegated to the capital's pubs by wartime restrictions on coastal access, their memories prolonging a 1930s literature of the seaside well into the 1950s.

Indeed, the elasticity of ‘public memory’ itself, increased, as David Trotter has demonstrated, by the ‘overwhelming’[ 53 ] effect of both new and newly durable media in the interwar years ensured that – through, for example, documentary films such as Marion Grierson's Beside the Seaside (1935) and J.B. Holmes's The Way to the Sea (1936) – the experiences of a permissive prewar locale were available to anyone wishing to situate their own work within the context of a peculiarly British noir. A double world of promiscuous encounters between strangers and friends, the heterotopic potentialities of the seaside town, even in their very frustration, render the early British noir thriller far more sexually subversive than its American cousin. Ancillary Brighton Rock, Toronto Film Festival | The Independent Brighton Rock, Toronto Film Festival It coasts along quite nicely Tuesday 14 September 2010 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Culture Graham Greene started out writing Brighton Rock as a screenplay, before turning it into his most famous novel.

The first screen adaptation came in 1947, nine years after its first publication, when Richard Attenborough gave one of his finest performances as the violent young gang leader Pinkie Brown. John Boulting's film is arguably the finest example of the British film noir. Many even consider it the greatest British film ever made. So it would seem that anyone foolish enough to do the remake is on a hiding to nothing. However, director Rowan Joffe, who won a Bafta for his TV drama The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall, has a few tricks up his sleeve, the primary one being to update the action to 1964. The influence of 1960s-set Brighton biker movies such as Quadrophenia is strong both in the production design and the attitude of the principle protagonists, especially the women. Joffe uses the more modern context to make Rose a much stronger, less passive character. A breakthrough performance from Andrea Riseborough as the waitress who Pinkie decides to marry so that she won't be able to testify against him in a murder rap, implicates Rose as a more willing participant in the ruse.

She aggressively pursues Pinkie and her determination to be an independent woman is brought out in a riveting scene that brings to the fore Riseborough's fascinating ability to mix vulnerability with stubbornness, in which she steals Pinkie's money to buy a highly fashionable dress. The elements of Catholicism that feature strongly in the source material fade into the background as Joffe hammers home the changing role of women in a more secular society with an awkward reference to the arrival of the pill. Helen Mirren is the surprising choice to play Ida. The busty barmaid from the book, who tries to convince Rose that she is making a huge mistake, is now working in a teashop. The change in her character to a more clued-up elder statesman ensures that Mirren joins the ranks of unlikely screen detectives – think Frances McDormand in Fargo – and her inquisitive nature and intuition ensure that she's a formidable foe for the brutish men. Having to follow in the footsteps of Attenborough is an albatross around Sam Riley's neck.

The Control star doesn't do a bad job as the murderer who digs himself deeper into trouble with his attempts to cover his criminal tracks, but by painting Pinkie as someone who does everything through force of will rather than charm, it's difficult to believe that Rose, in this more modern rendition, would fall for him. Andy Serkis in a ridiculous wig gives a cavalier, exuberant turn as crime boss Mr. Colleoni. The scenes with Serkis highlight many of the film's faults, the main one being the erratic production design. In the hotel that Colleoni calls home, the furniture is too kitsch and gaudy; the messy marital home of Pinkie looks like a badly put together and unauthentic theatre stage; and the incorporation of bikers doesn't work because Joffe is unable to escape the fact that the source material lends itself to film noir. At times the movie still looks and feels like it's taking place in the 1930s. The odd mishmash of traditional and modern gives the film an uneven and at times distracting feel. More about: Brighton Rock Reviews & Ratings - IMDb IMDb 48 out of 64 people found the following review useful: Why Make This Again?

from United Kingdom 15 March 2011 I went to see this version of Brighton Rock with my mum. She was keen to see how it matched up to the original Boulting Brothers film with Richard Attenborough. She and I were both disappointed. I was actually really rather bored for the first half and wanted to run out of the cinema screaming. It seemed to take for ever to get going. There were no characters I could empathise with. Rose who falls for bad boy Pinkie seemed too dim and snivelling to care about and Pinkie had so little charm I couldn't care less what happened to him. The actor Sam Riley's maturity (around 30)was against him playing the role of Pinkie, who I realised long into the film was meant to be in his teens. I thought that, perhaps the story, wasn't for me.... My mum kept on that it wasn't as good as the "classic" original. So I thought I'd find out for myself and got hold of a DVD. Was she right? Yes. Although by no means perfect it had a robust sense of what it was: a British noir gangster film.

Set in 1940s, shot in stark black and white it was gritty and hard and menacing. Whereas the look and feel of this version seemed to be at odds with the subject matter. In it's attempt to be lavish, this production, up-dated to the 60s seemed at times too clean and shiny. On the other hand, at other times it was unrealistically grubby : Rose's home - a 60s socail housing tower block, which would in reality have been spanking new, was dressed down to look disgustingly filthy and run down. These kinds of inconsitencies popped up not just in the design, but throughout the music, the camera-work and the diercting of the actors. The pacing of seemed to jump from set piece to set piece without a sense of flow or overall tone. The separate elements of the film didn't gel. The best description I can come up with is "clonky". In fact, I'd go further and say it is a ham fisted mishmash. Sorry to the filmmakers, I think you wasted a lot of effort on this. which is a shame. Was the above review useful to you?

21 out of 26 people found the following review useful: Weird and Not Engaging from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 18 November 2011 *** This review may contain spoilers *** In 1964, in Brighton, the hoodlum and smalltime gangster Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley) sees the murder of his chief and father figure Kite (Geoff Bell), stabbed by the smalltime crook Fred Hale (Sean Harris) on the street. His gang, formed by Spicer (Philip Davis), Cubitt (Craig Parkinson) and Dallow (Nonso Anozie), sells protection racket to the merchants of the area and they are disputing the territory with the powerful mobster Colleoni (Andy Serkis). They chase Hale and Pinkie kills him smashing his head with a stone. However, the waitress of the Snows restaurant, Rosie Wilson (Andrea Riseborough), sees Spicer running after Hale on the docks and the local photographer takes a picture of the trio and gives the receipt slip to Rosie. The sociopath Pinkie is assigned by Spicer to retrieve the slip and eliminate Rosie and he gets closer to her. The needy girl falls in love with Pinkie and promises him to keep silence.

Pinkie, who is disputing the leadership of the gang with Spicer, does not feel anything for Rosie but decides to marry her to avoid her testimony in the future. Meanwhile, Hale's lover and manager of the Snows, Ida Arnold (Helen Mirren), pursues Pinkie and tries to force Rosie to go to the police to tell the truth. "Brighton Rock" is a weird and not engaging remake of the 1947 film that is based on Graham Greene's novel. I did not see the original or read the novel, but I did not like this version. There are inconsistencies in the plot regarding why the sociopath Pinkie does not kill Rosie and prefers to marry her. When he records a 45 rpm vinyl record and gives it to Rosie, it is clear that the hoodlum does not feel anything for Rosie but hate. The conclusion with the record repeating "I love you" and the last scene showing the cross to indicate a miracle is awful. My vote is five. Title (Brazil): "O Pior dos Pecados" ("The Worst of the Sins") Was the above review useful to you?

27 out of 38 people found the following review useful: Curate's Egg of a film from United Kingdom 11 February 2011 As a Brighton resident, I had to see this, but also probably spent more time looking at the locations (and more critically) than a normal viewer. On the plus side, there is excellent cinematography, and the film creates an atmospheric mid 60's version of Brighton that might be convincing to anyone too young to remember that time, but which contained too many jarring anachronisms for me. For example Rose lives in a tower block, which could have existed in 1964, and would have still been soulless and depressing, but would also have been practically brand spanking new, not run down and shabby with 20 years of neglect. This highlights another failing of the film, the clichéd exaggerated unrelenting squalor that all the criminals live in, which again is untrue to the period, twitching net curtains and keeping up (often threadbare) appearances was how things worked then, in working class neighbourhoods especially.

You could create an oppressive atmosphere from these real elements (and the culture clash of the pre and post war worlds) perhaps more easily than from this invented total squalor. So if the world the film creates is a Hollywood version of 1960's Brighton, do the characters engage you? Well I loved Helen Mirren and John Hurt, they brought a touch of class whenever they appeared, and Phil Davis is another very fine actor who is always watchable. Sadly the two main characters don't quite pull it off, and if I have to lay the blame it is chiefly with Sam Riley's Pinkie. If he could have alternated his cold unsmiling thuggishness with some charm, shown Rose a little tenderness some vulnerability even, that would have made her falling for him, and her naive notion that she could save him more convincing, and maybe made his cruelty and occasional physical violence toward her more shocking. Andrea Riseborough as Rose gives a fair performance, given that she does not have much to work with. I'm sorry if this review makes the film sound worse than it is, because truth be told despite its failings it is consistently watchable, and still managed to engage me. An interesting failure.

Was the above review useful to you? 36 out of 56 people found the following review useful: 427th Review: Gothic Mods from the big screen 11 June 2011 While Brighton Rock is receiving a certain amount of stick (geddit?) from critics and reviewers who want to solely compare it to the original - I for one was lost in this - it's evocative, dark, broody, and a nice angsty character study of post-war Britain going hell for leather into the 60s. This is a film about anger and loss, about opportunity and ambition, and crime - and the elements that Graham Greene satirized so brilliantly in his novel are there - the Catholicism post-Evelyn Waugh, the rise of the working-class with money, and above all, desperate lonely early 20s love. All in all, the production values, the cameos, the central roles are more than competent - this is a very good British film, and it should be allowed 50 years on to stand on its on.

There are a number of excellent iconic scenes, from the scooters, to the bosses; and we liked that it's not just about petty crime or gangs, there's a lot going on here - it's nowhere near in any sense a bad film, and deserves a good audience. Was the above review useful to you? 14 out of 15 people found the following review useful: Good versus Evil, Sin and Redemption: Graham Greene Revisited from United States 3 September 2011 BRIGHTON ROCK is a British remake of the 1947 brilliant film noir based on the novel by Graham Greene an adapted for the screen by Graham Greene and Terrance Rattigan. This BRIGHTON ROCK has been updated from the original 1930s setting to the 1960s and the screenplay is by Rowan Joffe (who also directs) - tough competition with the original writers! The result is a dark film that relies on performances by some actors who are not up to the task and makes them seem even more weak by the presence of such brilliant actors in smaller roles as Helen Mirren, John Hurt, Philip Davis and Andrea Riseborough.

The story takes place in 1964 in Brighton, once a quiet seaside town, is suddenly overrun by gangs of sharp suited Mods and greasy Rockers looking for a riot. Looking to be the top Mod gangster, Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley) will stop at nothing to be the biggest name in the crime world - bigger than the competitor Colleoni (Andy Serkis). Pinkie witnesses the vicious death of fellow Mod Kite (Goeff Bell) and is determined to kill the perpetrator Hale (Sean Harris). Pinkie's ruthless and violent ambition takes over his mission and when he discovers that a waitress named Rose (Andrea Riseborough) who works at Snows, a café run by Ida (Helen Mirren), is involved tangentially in the murders, Pinkie decides to court the plain Jane Rose, knowing that if he marries her she cannot testify against him should she discover Pinkie's guilt in the murders. Ida had a 'connection' with Hale and sees through the veils of deceit Pinkie is placing on the innocent Rose, and she and her longtime friend Phil (John Hurt) undermine Pinkie's plans.

Pinkie marries Rose - a gesture that secures Rose's fascination and new love for Pinkie - to keep her from testifying against him. As factors around the conflicts between the two gangs tighten and Pinkie fears for his end, he convinces his new bride to take part in a mutual suicide, an act that has a surprising end. What is missing in this updated adaptation is Graham Greene's important emphasis on the theme of sin, guilt and Catholicism: there are attempts to bring these concepts into the script but they become of lesser importance than the action and dark evocation of a period piece. There mood is well described by the cinematography of John Mathieson, but the single most effective aspect of this film is the brilliant music score by the gifted British composer Martin Phipps, godson of Benjamin Britten. Were there not an original film for comparison the film would likely be better accepted. But for those who are ardent fans of the novels of Graham Greene this film adaptation will likely disappoint. It is currently available On Demand and simultaneously in theaters before the DVD is released here. Grady Harp from United Kingdom 18 February 2011 I went to see this film with some trepidation.

The original Graham Greene novel is very good and one of my favourites. The original film from 1947 was also extremely good, with Richard Attenborough as an unlikely but splendid villain. However this version was excellent. The fact that it had been updated to the 60s, which had worried me a little, worked well. Of course it did not have the period feel, but the aggression, violence and fighting for territory of the Mods and Rockers (which I remember well) echoed beautifully the behaviour of the gangsters and gave the opportunity for some very effective scenes visually. The acting I found completely plausible, with Phill Davies, John Hurt, Sam Riley and Andrea Riseborough all giving authentic portrayals. Helen Mirren, perhaps, looked a little too glamorous physically, but her acting was fine. Brighton itself was a wonderful additional character in all this. The contrast between the somewhat mindless hedonism of the holiday makers and the violent and ugly activities of the underworld was extremely effective and the use of the landscape beautiful and horrific in equal measure. The theme of sin, guilt and Catholicism was probably not dealt with as interestingly as in the novel, but that is a frequent limitation of the medium of film.

Why on earth the makers of the film felt that they were entitled to "improve" on Graham Greene's ending I do not know. But it did not spoil my overall judgement that this was a very good film. I hope it will inspire those who have not already done so to read the novel. Was the above review useful to you? 16 out of 23 people found the following review useful: Rowan Joffe's dark, suspenseful but fatally flawed remake of Brighton Rock. from United Kingdom 9 March 2011 Hearing the news that John Boulting's classic 1946 adaptation of Graham Greene's novel Brighton Rock was to be remade filled with me trepidation. The current spate of mostly inferior remakes are one thing but meddling with the perfection of this archetypical gangster film is another. How can any updated version possibly replace the indelible image of the 23 year old Richard Attenborough as the flick knife wielding baby faced assassin Pinkie Brown? As filming began and rumours of a 1960s Mods and Rockers setting emerged I began to have serious doubts if this remake was really going to be a good idea!

Thankfully fears that Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock is a sanitised version of the story are quickly allayed. The relocation of Brighton Rock to the 1960s does not mean that we are entering into the trendy youth culture of the era or being taken on an adolescent search for identity. The sharp-suited posers and greasy leather clad Rockers are merely a backdrop to a much darker reality as we are taken into a terrifying world of crime, guilt and inner-torment. Brighton Rock is concerned with the concepts of good versus evil, sin and redemption they were present in Greene's novel, the 1946 adaptation and once again are central in Rowan Joffe's remake. However, additional scenes and alterations to the 2010 update mean that Pinkie's progressively violent behaviour is almost justified. In the exhilarating opening sequence Pinkie witnesses the brutal murder of the gang's original leader Kite when Fred Hale slashes his throat. When Pinkie sees one of the few role models in his life burbling and drowning in his own blood revenge it seems is not only on the cards but unavoidable.

This kind of black and white, eye for an eye, morality detracts from the original story where Pinkie Brown's vicious streak appeared to be innate and a product of original sin. The character of Ida Arnold (Dame Helen Mirren) also has undergone a significant adjustment. In opposition to the Catholicism of Pinkie and Rose the pleasure seeking Ida was concerned only with the here and now. Mirren's portrayal plays these aspects down resulting in a more serious role and a lessening of the story's theological study. As with Attenborough before him Sam Riley's Pinkie is intense, dangerous and teeters on the edge of sanity. If anything in Joffe's adaptation Pinkie Brown undergoes a broader transformation than before as greater emphasis being placed upon his journey from a nervous lackey to maniacal gang leader. Unfortunately the 30 year old Riley he does not resemble a juvenile delinquent. Therefore the shy adolescent awkwardness that Pinkie displays towards adulthood and in particular his relationship with Rose, (conveyed so expertly by Attenborough,) is absent.

Andrea Riseborough gives an outstanding performance as Rose she too goes on a psychological journey from being a naive and mousey youngster to an assertive young woman attracted to Pinkie's confidence and menace. The scene in which Pinkie in effect buys Rose from her abusive father for £150 adds a social realist dimension to the film uncovering the lack of options available to a young working-class woman in 'sixties Britain. The squalid surroundings of Pinkie and Rose's flat complete with peeling wallpaper, scuffed furniture and squeaky floorboards are also reminiscent of a Kitchen Sink drama. There is some impressive cinematography by John Mathieson as the camera pans from the threatening crashing waves on Brighton Beach to the scenic seaside cafés foreshadowing the storm that is building. The swelling orchestral soundtrack also adds to the heightened sense of panic and drama. The tea rooms, arcades and dance-halls of 1960s Brighton are also accurately recreated as are the neglected interiors of the boarding houses. And yet There is something oddly unreal about Joffe's Brighton Rock partly down to the unnecessary time shift which does nothing but confuse the audience.

The film's characters seem stuck in the wrong era originating as they do from austere post-war Britain both in appearance and behaviour. Using the Mods and Rockers backdrop and casting of Philip Davis, (who appeared in Quadrophenia,) as Spicer turns the movie into a pastiche of sorts leaving us with a souped-up hyper-reality. This is Brighton as seen through the eyes of the cinema goer not the world of Graham Greene's novel. Dark, menacing and suspenseful Rowan Joffe's Brighton Rock is well worth seeing it is just unfortunate that the film is not as good as the sum of its parts. Was the above review useful to you? 21 out of 34 people found the following review useful: Gripping, drama, very well acted. from United Kingdom 5 February 2011 I am not good at long reviews but I didn't see the original or read the book. Therefore I am judging this as a movie in itself rather than comparing it to the original. I thought it was excellent, the drab interiors, the plain simplicity of Rose, so well acted and the sadness in her innocence, all made this quite emotional for me.

Helen Mirren was a delight to the eye, so beautiful, wrinkles and all. No cosmetic surgery there. I think they did a good job of making Brighton 1960s and sensibly only showed one CGI shot of the West pier, rather than trying to re-create what it looked like. It held my attention throughout and I very nearly cried at the end. Sad its getting bad reviews. Perhaps it was too British for some people. Was the above review useful to you? 7 out of 7 people found the following review useful: Mildly engaging crime drama from Boulder, CO 13 February 2012 The main character of this movie is Pinkie Brown, a small-time thug in Brighton, England, in the 1960s. Pinkie's true evil nature comes out when he tries to take over a small gang of criminals after their leader had been killed by a rival gang. As played here, Pinkie is in his 20s and, as brash and amoral as he is, he and his mediocre cohorts are no match for the rival gang that basically runs underground crime in Brighton.

The action is sordid and ugly, but the glossy color photography works at cross purposes to conveying that mood. Much of the photography is more appropriate for an art film than for this down-and-dirty fare, making me think that maybe black and white would have been a more appropriate choice. As Pinkie, I found Sam Riley just a little too handsome for the part--he does not exude the menace and harsh personality that is Pinkie's nature. I found the initial setup scenes rapid-paced and confusing, requiring close attention; if you don't follow what has happened early on, you will be at a loss to fully understand what happens later. An additional complication to my following the opening scenes was the fact that I am not a Brit and didn't always follow the cadences and clipped manner of speaking. I confess to starting the movie over after about fifteen minutes, with English subtitles turned on. That was a great help. The score that often seems to aspire to the transcendent seems greatly out of place. I wish I had seen this movie before having read the book, since having some of the images in mind would have been good. Never having been to Brighton, my mental picture of it would have been greatly enhanced by what is well captured here.

While the movie strips from the book much of the depth of the themes of sexuality, morality, loyalty, and sin, there are things in the movie that I found improved upon the book. I liked Helen Mirren's portrayal of Ida as a more centered person than the blithe Ida of the book, and John Hurt fleshed out Ida's friend Phil better than what I got from the book. And there are a lot of little things. For example, I pictured the candy, Brighton rock, as being something like a candy cane rather than the weighty rod seen in the movie. I regret that Pinkie's lawyer Prewitt was deleted--he was a truly Dickensian character in the book. And why the great ending in the book was changed is beyond me. Was the above review useful to you? 4 out of 4 people found the following review useful: Can You Handle The Truth? 25 November 2012 This is a dark,intense 'film noir' type drama. The backdrop to it is Brighton, England of the 1960's with rebelling youth(mods and rockers).The actual story is about a young murderous psychopath thug involved in a gang war.

A gullible waitress unwittingly becomes a witness to murder and the thug needs to deal with it. The movie is atmospheric and grim. No hint of much happiness nor any likable characters.Everyone in the movie is flawed in one way or another. Maybe that is why many people did not rate this movie highly. There is a religious and moral agenda in this picture which if recognized may disturb some viewers. I thought all the main actors gave edgy and compelling performances. The 2 leads namely Sam Riley and Andrea Riseborough are outstanding with on balance the latter stealing the show. The very last scene in the film is brilliant and thought provoking. 7/10 Brighton Rock (Vintage Classics) eBook: Graham Greene, J M Coetzee: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store Kindle Store Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Amazon Media EU S.Ã r.l. This price was set by the publisher. * Unlike print books, digital books are subject to VAT.

Buy now Promotions apply when you purchase These promotions will be applied to this item: Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions. Add Audible narration to your purchase for just Â£3.99 Deliver to your Kindle or other device Send a free sample Deliver to your Kindle or other device Add to List Brighton Rock (Vintage Classics) Kindle Edition by Audible Narration: Audible Narration Switch back and forth between reading the Kindle book and listening to the Audible narration. Add narration for a reduced price of Â£3.99 after you buy the Kindle book. Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Next Get a Â£1 credit for movies or TV Enjoy Â£1.00 credit to spend on movies or TV on Amazon Video when you purchase any Amazon Kindle Book from the Kindle Store (excluding Kindle Unlimited, Periodicals and free Kindle Books) offered by Amazon.co.uk.

A maximum of 1 credit per customer applies. UK customers only. Offer ends at 23:59 on Wednesday, September 27, 2017. Terms and conditions apply Product details Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0140184929 Publisher: Vintage Digital; Film Tie-In edition (2 Oct. 2010) Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.Ã r.l. Language: English By A Customer on 16 Jun. 2003 Format: Paperback A fan of Graham Greene, I consider this the best of his books I have read so far. Quite long for a Graham Greene book, I found this book literally impossible to put down and finished it in one sitting. In Pinkie, Greene has created a character repulsive in his seeming amorality and ruthlessness, and yet one that you cannot help sympathising with. Considered one of the greatest villians in fiction, Pinkie's character slowly comes into focus as a victim too - and someone for whom redemption is visible on the horizon but always out of reach. I have always found Greene a master at handling moral ambiguity, and Brighton Rock is an example of Greene at the height of his powers.

Read this book for a well-crafted story, and one that makes serious points about the weaknesses of moral absolutism. Personally I think the ending is sheer genius.

Question: Which book is set in the 1930s and features Pinkie as the leader of a gang?
Answer: BRIGHTON ROCK