Showroom Film Studies - Spring 2008: British Gangster Movies

Excellent piece of criminal noir based on the Graham Greene novel. Richard Attenborough plays a strikingly edgy villain and there is some great support from other members of the cast. While certainly a classic, it loses half a star for not quite carrying off some of the complexities of the book.

What would otherwise be an average film is lifted by some excellent directoral and cinematographic touches and a powerful performance from Stanley Baker. The prison riot sequence is particularly good and the jazz/blues score by Johnny Dankworth is effective.

Burton turns in a good performance as Vic Dakin and the backstory is evocative of real-life gangland events of the period. The pay-roll robbery is well done and the film provides an interesting portrait of the villain in question.

Performance blends gangster movie with the arthouse and sex and drug fuelled excesses of the time and manages to do so superbly thanks to Roeg and Cammell's vision. Jagger is deceptively good (especially in the musical sequence) but Fox puts in a brilliant 'performance'. Visceral and shocking, even by today's standards with an underlying theme about identity that draws comparison with David Lynch's more recent work, though pre-dating it by thirty and more years.

Soderburgh delivers a well nuanced story making good use of a fractured narrative, flash forwards and backs. Particularly well done is a conversation sequence between Stamp's Wilson, the Limey of the title and Lesley Anne Warren's character, shot in several locations and seamlessly edited together.