Of course there's a hell
2026-10-08 06:09Not until the last half-hour of Brighton Rock (1947) does anyone get around to quoting Marlowe's Mephistopheles, but it's as apt as a title drop for a film in which murder is committed in the ghost-train shriek and rattle of the Inferno and damnation is taken as a surer fact than love. Nor am I out of it covers the holiday crowds in their threepenny deck chairs and the drizzle of coal-smoke on a terraced street, the windmill of racecourse tic-tac and the pier-end suck of the tide, the straight-razor seediness under the strenuous gaiety of a Whitsun weekend in the pre-war Brighton that is the human condition of Pinkie Brown. His telephone number starts with three sixes. He urges the girl who loves him to the despair of suicide. "Of course it's true," he asserts his personal credo of "flames, damnations, torments," looking every inch the demonic altar boy with his dead-eyed baby face contemplating a rosary. His real, impoverished age flickers in it for a second as he puts the beads from him, dismissing without even a shrug the earnest suggestion of heaven: "Maybe."
What a breakout for Richard Attenborough, twenty-three years old and playing a convincing seventeen as the seaside Caesar of a small-time razor gang whose territorial warning, "You think I'm finished," only underlines his adolescent obliviousness to the truth that he never got started. Too slender for his dapper cheap suits, he looks callow, unwholesome, a riveting dead end of the energies that knot a restless cat's cradle between his fingers like the traps he sets for himself as the loyal, needless killing of an indiscreet journalist unravels a hydra's worth of loose ends. The viciousness that snaps out of him in broken dolls and slashed faces still shocks despite the amendments of the BBFC, but so does the extremity of his youth, the dedicated perversity of pursuing his own doom in the guise of "security." The souvenir record he cuts in a moment of corrosive, confessional spite could undo him with the hiss of a gramophone and he gives it into the trusting hands of the last person who should play it as if he's planting his own dynamite. Rigidly repulsed by the pleasures of the flesh, Pinkie pacing the registrar's office where he waits to perjure himself into an alibi marriage mutters like a condemned man of his childhood intention to be a priest, characteristically negative as anything else in his tunnel vision of a life: "Why not? They keep away from all this." He's a war too early for even a Teddy Boy, but his unswerving nihilism gives him something of the sickly, proto-punk fury of the teenage wreckers of Violent Playground (1958) who expect nothing for their generation but the H-bomb—even a viewer who responds to the childishness cracked through his reckless cruelty may have trouble imagining what sociological salvation this puritanical little murderer could be offered that would compete with the terror and the glamour and the comfort of going to hell. Affecting a seduction in the rain-deserted shadows of the Palace Pier, he rolls a bottle of vitriol around his pocket as another man might jingle his money. He pronounces it slyly, but there's scarcely a joke in the Freudian Latin of his "suicide pax."
No character this bleakly bound needs an evil angel and the story has the sense to triangulate him instead with two diametrically different forces of fatal goodness, respectively incarnated by the veteran Hermione Baddeley and newcomer Carol Marsh. "Won't anybody shut that brass's mouth?" Pinkie demands in his volcanic first line, but it takes more than a few smashed glasses to silence Ida Arnold. Her broad-beamed bottle-blonde blowsiness sets her up as the natural enemy of his tightly wound repression, but her practical, inexorable sense of right and wrong which have nothing to do with virtue or sin makes an electrifying avenger out of her seaside artiste who takes her cues from automatic writing and bottled beer, Pierrette as Erinys. A frightened man disappeared on her in the plain air of an amusement arcade and the coroner's verdict didn't wash. The title is her metaphor, people like sticks of rock with their natures stamped immutably through them. "I'm like everyone else, my dear. I want to see justice done, that's all." Rose could do it with a word, but she'll keep shtum till Doomsday. Thin-shouldered and devout, clearing tables at the café as if frightened of the clatter, she could have been named out of Blake, her frail weed of beauty blighted by the radiant worm of her love for Pinkie; her deer-brows give her the look of a trapped wild thing in the warren of their bridal bedsit, but her teeth show in defense of her daemon lover. It's more than mistaken innocence. She shares his instinct for annihilation. It is a scalding and unconditional, implacable acceptance, embracing him at the triumphant cost of her sixteen-year-old immortal soul: "I wouldn't want to be saved if he was lost." Between justice and love, what chance does mere wickedness stand? The answer doesn't feel mechanistically moralizing, careening to its improvised irony of an epilogue through an ecosystem as wittily and grottily etched as Dickens. William Hartnell, Wylie Watson, and Nigel Stock make an authentically charmless mob, ever uneasier in their hand-me-down loyalties as their hellbent boy-leader drags them all toward his own reckoning, while Harcourt Williams with his face like a spooked concertina mixes Shakespeare with Burgundy as the ruined solicitor Prewitt. Alan Wheatley runs through a day-drowned nightmare as the marked, stalked Fred Hale, the one rider in real terror of what waits in the phosphorescently screaming dark. From his imperial salon of a suite at the Cosmopolitan, Charles Goldner as the godfatherly racketeer Colleoni casts a quizzical eye over the disruptions to his businesslike turf. "Now you do understand, don't you? Brewer's been complaining, so don't do it again." Even the small parts rounded out by Virginia Winter, George Carney, Joan Sterndale-Bennett, or Harry Ross all chip in to the breeze and scurry of their town, the glitter of the ocean, the advertisements on the buses, the strings of bunting in the misting rain.
Turning an underworld out of a seaside resort had been an easier descent than its original author envisioned. Pretty much since the novel's publication in 1938, Graham Greene had been obliged to deprecate his hectic, criminous, down-at-heel Brighton as the product of his imagination and in order to pacify the borough council enough for a permit, the film co-adapted by Greene and Terence Rattigan and directed and produced by John and Roy Boulting had to follow suit. The walking tours attest to their success. The title crawl explicitly sets the action in a safely stamped-out past—a newspaper pins it as 1935—but the semi-stolen location shooting makes it an equal document of the summer of 1947, its noir fictions embedded in a psychogeography of record temperatures and candid citizenry. The stations of its plot can be followed from the railway to the promenade, ghost-printed onto addresses since redeveloped into memory. Its purgatorial funhouse is filled with glancing mirrors and warped postcards and macabre little nods tucked into the mise-en-scène, like a holidaymaker dozing underneath a violent headline in much the same attitude as the described corpse. Peter Graham Scott and Gilbert Taylor pitched in with Harry Waxman on the forceful cinematography that makes even the studio-shot scenes feel far from stage-bound. The municipal and the criminal, the fanciful and the historic fused permanently in a stall-smashing rumble at the races which got the Boultings thrown off the course. "Bite all the way down and you still read Brighton." I had wanted to see this movie for decades; I got my chance on slightly dusty, gorgeous 35 mm at the Harvard Film Archive, my first film in a theater all year, but for purposes of home viewing it is readily available on BFI Player or Kanopy or even Blu-Ray. The punch line of Pinkie Brown who would barely rather marry than hang is his sexual presence, for once in his actor's career: baleful and contemptuously magnetic, a serpent-shine of a bad inspiration in a snap-brim hat and tartan tie. What an extra circle of perdition he would have found his fandom. This justice brought to you by my lost backers at Patreon.
What a breakout for Richard Attenborough, twenty-three years old and playing a convincing seventeen as the seaside Caesar of a small-time razor gang whose territorial warning, "You think I'm finished," only underlines his adolescent obliviousness to the truth that he never got started. Too slender for his dapper cheap suits, he looks callow, unwholesome, a riveting dead end of the energies that knot a restless cat's cradle between his fingers like the traps he sets for himself as the loyal, needless killing of an indiscreet journalist unravels a hydra's worth of loose ends. The viciousness that snaps out of him in broken dolls and slashed faces still shocks despite the amendments of the BBFC, but so does the extremity of his youth, the dedicated perversity of pursuing his own doom in the guise of "security." The souvenir record he cuts in a moment of corrosive, confessional spite could undo him with the hiss of a gramophone and he gives it into the trusting hands of the last person who should play it as if he's planting his own dynamite. Rigidly repulsed by the pleasures of the flesh, Pinkie pacing the registrar's office where he waits to perjure himself into an alibi marriage mutters like a condemned man of his childhood intention to be a priest, characteristically negative as anything else in his tunnel vision of a life: "Why not? They keep away from all this." He's a war too early for even a Teddy Boy, but his unswerving nihilism gives him something of the sickly, proto-punk fury of the teenage wreckers of Violent Playground (1958) who expect nothing for their generation but the H-bomb—even a viewer who responds to the childishness cracked through his reckless cruelty may have trouble imagining what sociological salvation this puritanical little murderer could be offered that would compete with the terror and the glamour and the comfort of going to hell. Affecting a seduction in the rain-deserted shadows of the Palace Pier, he rolls a bottle of vitriol around his pocket as another man might jingle his money. He pronounces it slyly, but there's scarcely a joke in the Freudian Latin of his "suicide pax."
No character this bleakly bound needs an evil angel and the story has the sense to triangulate him instead with two diametrically different forces of fatal goodness, respectively incarnated by the veteran Hermione Baddeley and newcomer Carol Marsh. "Won't anybody shut that brass's mouth?" Pinkie demands in his volcanic first line, but it takes more than a few smashed glasses to silence Ida Arnold. Her broad-beamed bottle-blonde blowsiness sets her up as the natural enemy of his tightly wound repression, but her practical, inexorable sense of right and wrong which have nothing to do with virtue or sin makes an electrifying avenger out of her seaside artiste who takes her cues from automatic writing and bottled beer, Pierrette as Erinys. A frightened man disappeared on her in the plain air of an amusement arcade and the coroner's verdict didn't wash. The title is her metaphor, people like sticks of rock with their natures stamped immutably through them. "I'm like everyone else, my dear. I want to see justice done, that's all." Rose could do it with a word, but she'll keep shtum till Doomsday. Thin-shouldered and devout, clearing tables at the café as if frightened of the clatter, she could have been named out of Blake, her frail weed of beauty blighted by the radiant worm of her love for Pinkie; her deer-brows give her the look of a trapped wild thing in the warren of their bridal bedsit, but her teeth show in defense of her daemon lover. It's more than mistaken innocence. She shares his instinct for annihilation. It is a scalding and unconditional, implacable acceptance, embracing him at the triumphant cost of her sixteen-year-old immortal soul: "I wouldn't want to be saved if he was lost." Between justice and love, what chance does mere wickedness stand? The answer doesn't feel mechanistically moralizing, careening to its improvised irony of an epilogue through an ecosystem as wittily and grottily etched as Dickens. William Hartnell, Wylie Watson, and Nigel Stock make an authentically charmless mob, ever uneasier in their hand-me-down loyalties as their hellbent boy-leader drags them all toward his own reckoning, while Harcourt Williams with his face like a spooked concertina mixes Shakespeare with Burgundy as the ruined solicitor Prewitt. Alan Wheatley runs through a day-drowned nightmare as the marked, stalked Fred Hale, the one rider in real terror of what waits in the phosphorescently screaming dark. From his imperial salon of a suite at the Cosmopolitan, Charles Goldner as the godfatherly racketeer Colleoni casts a quizzical eye over the disruptions to his businesslike turf. "Now you do understand, don't you? Brewer's been complaining, so don't do it again." Even the small parts rounded out by Virginia Winter, George Carney, Joan Sterndale-Bennett, or Harry Ross all chip in to the breeze and scurry of their town, the glitter of the ocean, the advertisements on the buses, the strings of bunting in the misting rain.
Turning an underworld out of a seaside resort had been an easier descent than its original author envisioned. Pretty much since the novel's publication in 1938, Graham Greene had been obliged to deprecate his hectic, criminous, down-at-heel Brighton as the product of his imagination and in order to pacify the borough council enough for a permit, the film co-adapted by Greene and Terence Rattigan and directed and produced by John and Roy Boulting had to follow suit. The walking tours attest to their success. The title crawl explicitly sets the action in a safely stamped-out past—a newspaper pins it as 1935—but the semi-stolen location shooting makes it an equal document of the summer of 1947, its noir fictions embedded in a psychogeography of record temperatures and candid citizenry. The stations of its plot can be followed from the railway to the promenade, ghost-printed onto addresses since redeveloped into memory. Its purgatorial funhouse is filled with glancing mirrors and warped postcards and macabre little nods tucked into the mise-en-scène, like a holidaymaker dozing underneath a violent headline in much the same attitude as the described corpse. Peter Graham Scott and Gilbert Taylor pitched in with Harry Waxman on the forceful cinematography that makes even the studio-shot scenes feel far from stage-bound. The municipal and the criminal, the fanciful and the historic fused permanently in a stall-smashing rumble at the races which got the Boultings thrown off the course. "Bite all the way down and you still read Brighton." I had wanted to see this movie for decades; I got my chance on slightly dusty, gorgeous 35 mm at the Harvard Film Archive, my first film in a theater all year, but for purposes of home viewing it is readily available on BFI Player or Kanopy or even Blu-Ray. The punch line of Pinkie Brown who would barely rather marry than hang is his sexual presence, for once in his actor's career: baleful and contemptuously magnetic, a serpent-shine of a bad inspiration in a snap-brim hat and tartan tie. What an extra circle of perdition he would have found his fandom. This justice brought to you by my lost backers at Patreon.
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