Offered recently as a 'freebie' with a UK newspaper it was just about worth the price. The name 'Terence Rattigan' on a screenplay usually guarantees quality that fails to date - witness his masterpiece 'The Way To The Stars' which was released two years prior to Brighton Rock and still holds up magnificently - but this is one time it fails to deliver, though the blame may lie more with co-screenwriter Graham Greene, author of the original novel. Much of the problem lies with the mannered 'acting' of Dickie Attenborough, a lifelong victim of overratedness, who spends the film labouring under the delusion that his idea of a fixed, blank, expressionless stare equates to menace. He is given one hilarious line to deliver during his meeting with rival gang-leader Colleoni to the effect that Colleoni thinks his (Pinkie Brown) gang is too small; given that his 'gang' consists of three members, frail Senior Citizen Spicer (Wylie Watson) who gives the impression that even in his heyday he would have been hard put to defeat a fiesty Girl Guide; 'stock' caricature Cubit (Nigel Stock) sporting the kind of joke 'villain' moustache which was surely used by George Cole as the model for his GENUINE comic wide-boy Flash Harry in the St Trinian's series and later by Michael Palin in Monty Python and finally Dallow (William Hartnell) the closest approximation to a 'real' gangster - though 'close' is relative and is this case Hartnell is about as close to a real gangster as Hull is to Fairbanks, Alaska - albeit one with a penchant for the kind of suits sported by Nicely-Nicely Johnson in Guys and Dolls. Whilst Colleoni - in his novel Greene based the character not on an Italian but on real Brighton gangster Darby Sabeni who was in fact Maltese - lives in splendour at the Cosmopolitan (read Metropole) hotel Pinkie and his 'gang' rough it in a sleazy rooming house that lacks even such basics as pillow cases. Totally lacking in charisma it's virtually impossible to imagine even someone as naive as Carol Marsh's Rose agreeing to date Pinkie on the basis of one five-minute conversation let alone marry him given that someone as attractive as Rose with a job in an upmarket restaurant would have no trouble attracting men from whom she could take her pick. Similarly Fred Hale (Alan Wheatley) who, as Kolly Kibber, has been sent by his newspaper to Brighton with a brief to visit popular spots and leave a card in each one to be redeemed by his newspaper to the tune of ten shillings (50p) to anyone that finds them and challenges Kibber. If, as is implied, Hale has somehow 'crossed' Pinkie in the past why would he not either refuse an assignment that would take him to Brighton or call in sick. I accept that at the time (1947) few, if any viewers would have questioned the risibility of a geriatric gangster (more realistically Wylie Watson played Mr. Josser - who began the film by retiring at age 65 - the very next year (1948) in 'London Belongs To Me' in which Attenborough also appeared as Percy Boon, a fellow tenant in the Lodging House in Dulcimer Street in which all the main characters live) and would have accepted a blank stare as passable 'acting' but almost 60 years on it just won't do.
Review of Brighton Rock
