February 6, 2012

10 The Criminal (1960)

***½
Country: UK
Director: Joseph Losey


In a recent post on They Made Me a Fugitive (1947), I cited that film as a rare British example of American-style film noir. Joseph Losey's 1960 picture The Criminal (released in the US two years later under the rather misleading title The Concrete Jungle) is another example of a film noir made in Britain with genuine fidelity to the conventions of the genre, although with some updating—it's more lurid and more sexually explicit than earlier American examples of the genre—that brings it closer to the spirit of the then-emerging Swinging Sixties. Losey was, of course, actually an American with previous experience directing Hollywood noirs (M, The Prowler, The Big Night), a refugee from the film industry witch hunts of the early fifties. Relocating to Britain and working at first under various pseudonyms, he continued his film directing career as an expatriate until his death in 1984.

The Criminal opens with a shot of three men sitting around a table playing poker with tense concentration. As they make their final bet of 7,000 pounds and lay down their cards, the camera draws back for a longer shot—to reveal that the men are actually sitting in a prison cell and the 7,000 pounds is really seven cigarettes. Almost immediately the credit sequence begins, a two-minute long take of numerous prisoners and guards and the roving camera performing an elaborately choreographed dance around each other while the credits roll and on the soundtrack Cleo Laine sings the mournful, bluesy theme song: "All my sadness, all my joy / Came from loving a thieving boy." It's a remarkable opening which announces unequivocally that this is going to be a film that uses image and sound in ways which will keep us constantly surprised.

In the film Stanley Baker plays a career criminal named John Bannion who is due to be released on parole the next day. During his three years inside, he has been planning a racetrack robbery in meticulous detail. Upon his release he reconnects with an old criminal crony, Mike Carter (played by the American actor Sam Wanamaker, another refugee from the Hollywood witch hunts), who helps him handpick a team to assist in the heist. The evening of his release, Carter organizes a welcome home party for Bannion, where he meets the sexy and seductive Suzanne (Margit Saad), who throws herself at him, and soon he has fallen in love with her. The robbery succeeds, and Bannion takes the stolen money to a field in the countryside, where he buries it, planning to retrieve it to be laundered after it has cooled off.

When Bannion makes the mistake of taking 500 pounds from the loot to buy an engagement ring for Suzanne, this allows the police to trace the money back to him, and he quickly finds himself back in prison. As soon as he arrives, he begins to plan an escape so that he can make his way to the loot, the escape to be covered by a riot engineered by Bannion's prison friends to divert attention away from him. The riot and escape form a stunningly conceived sequence, sensationally staged by Losey, photographed by Robert Krasker (Carol Reed's Odd Man Out and The Third Man), and scored by jazz composer John Dankworth. It's a good example of what David Thomson identifies as the defining feature of Losey's early films, the melding of the contradictory qualities of "subtlety" and "hysteria"—subtle in its precisely controlled visual choreography, hysterical in its typically flamboyant Losey touches and its hyperkinetic sense of organized chaos.


The screenplay, credited to Alun Owen (A Hard Day's Night) but according to the British Film Institute actually a rewrite of a script by veteran Hammer Films writer Jimmy Sangster, gives the film a tidy four-act structure. The first and third parts—about half the film's running time—take place in prison. In many ways these sections are an update of the traditional Warner Brothers-style prison movies of the thirties. The power structure of the inmates with Johnny as "top man," the opposing alliances of prisoners enforced by violent intimidation, the autocratic head guard, the weak prison warden—all the elements associated with this type of movie are present, only depicted here with even greater than usual emphasis on prison corruption and brutality. As bleak as this prison world is, though, it's a world that is totally ordered and self-regulated. The rules that govern it are understood, each man has a defined place in its power hierarchy, and its concepts of justice and ethics—as peculiar as they may be—are clear. At the same time it's also a world whose sense of order allows for a certain amount of individuality and fluidity within its social structure.

One of the great ironies of The Criminal is that when Bannion leaves prison, he finds in the criminal world outside its walls an even more oppressive environment, and the film takes an unexpected turn from a prison/heist movie to a movie about a loner battling the power elite (a type of narrative strategy Losey would use with even more startling results in his next film, the juvenile delinquent thriller turned sci-fi chiller These Are the Damned). At this point the film noir ethos really comes into play. Maybe Losey did in fact have a Marxist world view, because what happens to Bannion outside prison could almost be considered analogous to the plight of the individual worker in the face of a monolithic power structure, here a criminal syndicate organized on corporate principles. As Mike Carter warns Bannion at one point when he attempts to rebel against the dictates of the higher-ups in the criminal world, "Your sort doesn't fit into an organization. So we can't have you running about messing things up, now can we, Johnny?"

An even greater irony is that while Bannion might believe he's in control of his destiny, in this deterministic film noir universe the concept of choice turns out to be largely illusory. It is only toward the end of the film that he realizes he has been played and betrayed by the criminal organization the whole way to get him to lead them to the money. Every decision, every action he has taken has actually been preordained. Subtle forces have been exerted on him to move him in a certain direction, and his every reaction to these forces has been predicted and plotted in advance. Bannion thinks he has been acting on his own initiative, but the entire time since his release from prison, about twenty minutes into the movie, he has been callously manipulated like a piece in a chess game.

If like Bannion you think there is any possibility of his overcoming the odds against him, forget it. "Don't be a silly boy, John," Carter tells him smugly. "You can't win." And of course he's right.

You might also like:
These Are the Damned (1963)
They Made Me a Fugitive (1947)

10 comments:

  1. Excellent point you make with Thomson's analysis of subtlety and hysteria within Losey (you can certainly see it in 'The Prowler'). Stanley Baker's performance is this film is brilliant - he was a great actor, with a visceral presence on screen; his playing of the ending is both heartbreaking and terrifying.

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    1. GOM, thanks so much for your speedy and thoughtful comment. After "The Servant" (for me Losey's masterpiece) the hysteria seemed to become much more muted, replaced by a kind of arty stateliness. Thomson admires Losey's pre-"Accident" work but sees that film as the beginning of his downfall, with its "pastoral slowness and pretension." He does have a point, but I like the later films well enough. I just think of them as coming from a different phase of his career. But there's no denying they lack the vitality of movies like "The Criminal." Baker IS great in this film, exactly the way you describe him. He was good in "Accident" too although it's really Dirk Bogarde's movie. I have "Eva" at home right now and plan to watch it very soon. I'm interested to see how he fares, especially when teamed with the great Jeanne Moreau. As for "The Prowler," I've never understood the enthusiasm for this picture. (I know I'm probably in the minority here.) The second half in particular strikes me as absurdly preposterous, even for film noir, where a healthy dose of willing suspension of disbelief on the the part of the viewer is a given.

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  2. This reminds me a lot of the British film made during this period. It is also reminiscent of Becker's Le Trou.

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    1. Kim, it does have that jazzy, just pre-Mod feeling to it, accentuated by Dankworth's music score. I have read one essay that criticizes the music as dating the film. I would say rather that it places the film in a specific time frame. One thing that distinguishes it from "Le Trou" (a wonderful film) is that "The Criminal" is a hybrid prison/heist/existential noir film. I recall Becker's film as being strictly a prison movie (with some existential overtones). The real difference that distinguishes the two is that the element of "hysteria" that GOM and I were discussing isn't in the Becker movie, which is more clinical in its style, without the flamboyant stylistic touches of Losey's early films.

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  3. I have been become more and more of an admirer of Losey with every film I have watched of his during the past few years. Admittedly, I have only seen about five (THE PROWLER, THE SERVANT,KING COUNTRY, THESE ARE THE DAMNED,THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR) of his films but have found them all fascinating. I recorded THE CRIMINAL off TCM a while back and it got buried in a pile and forgotten like many others. Your excellent review has enticed me to search for it and give it a viewing.

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    1. John, I like almost everything I've seen by Losey too. But I still have some catching up to do on his earliest American and British films. I did see "The Boy with Green Hair" many years ago on television but don't remember much about it beyond finding it interesting but thinking its parable-like premise was awfully obvious. (But wasn't Dean Stockwell a great child actor? I've seen him in quite a few things recently, and he was always so good. Loved him in "The Secret Garden." The other child actor I admire a lot is the young Natalie Wood.)

      I think you'll like "The Criminal." I saw it on TCM a year or two ago but to my knowledge they haven't shown it again. These days I find myself unable to write on a film unless there's something about it I can strongly connect with for inspiration. I liked this one enough to rewatch it and write a post on it when the subject pool was at low tide.

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  4. Losey's reputation has been on the rise over the past decades in large measure for his remarkable versatility in a number of genres, his exceeding film scholarship and ability to provide great reference points in his films, and his superb craftsmanship. THE CRIMINAL certainly makes a persuasive case as his masterpiece, bringing together the fatalism of the French genre masters Becker and Melville, with vital points of reference to THE KILLING and THE ASPHALT JUNGLE in it's running time.

    I've had the fortune of seeing nearly every Losey film released, and I would count THE CRIMINAL in the Top 5 with THE GO-BETWEEN, DON GIOVANNI, THE PROWLER and THE SERVANT, but I also would issues high marks to GREEN HAIR, THE SLEEPING TIGER, MR. KLEIN and a few others.

    Excellent discussion there of the ironies when one finds more criminal oppression outside the prison walls and of the noirish elements at play. Yes, Losey's Marxist views have been discussed throughout his career.

    Superlative essay on an essential work and director.

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    1. Sam, thank you! And thank you for your insightful comments about Losey and his films. While "The Criminal" certainly has resemblances to the films and directors you named, Losey made the picture his own. Some directors with what you call the "film scholarship" of Losey take the lazy way out and don't go further than patching together elements from other films, and sometimes they get praised for this. But Losey seemed to use those "reference points" as a means of arriving at his own style. He's a director I lost touch with after "The Go-Between" but am now in the process of rediscovering, and the "superb craftsmanship" you talk about is something that becomes more evident to me with each film of his I see. Because he didn't write his own films, he's somewhat dependent on the quality of the screenplay, but his artistic decisions in interpreting those scripts always seem right. Of course, here he had a great screenplay to work from, as he did later with those written by Harold Pinter.

      As I said, for me "The Servant" is his masterpiece, and I also found "King and Country" excellent, Losey's take on a subject that has been addressed by some great films. I would place "The Criminal" just behind those two among the Losey films I've seen and especially like it because it is in a genre I have a particular fondness for. And, of course, the irresistibly weird "These Are the Damned" is in a class of its own! My next post will be on another Losey film. I plan to watch "Mr. Klein" soon and also "Sleeping Tiger," which has been highly recommended to me by another knowledgeable cinephile.

      I should add that anyone reading this who would like to read more about "The Criminal" should seek out your colleague Allan Fish's post at Wonders in the Dark, in which he approaches the movie by placing it in the context of postwar British crime films.

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  5. R.D., another fabulous review, another film to add to my growing list of must-see movies. As a Hammer fan, I was especially interested to learn that Sangster (a better writer than given credsit for) penned the first draft of the script. (And less we forget, THESE ARE THE DAMNED was a Hammer production.) I may have asked this before, but have you seen FINGER OF GUILT (aka THE INTIMATE STRANGER), which Losey made under a psedonym? It's been high on my list of must-see movies for several years. The plot (involving an an American director in England, just Losey) and the presence of Richard Basehart intrigue me.

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    1. Rick, knowing how you like the crime/noir genre, I think you'll enjoy this one. I belong to a rental service called ClassicFlix (www.classicflix.com), and that's where I got it. Haven't seen "Finger of Guilt" and don't believe it's available on DVD, at least not from the DVD rental services I use. Several of Losey's earlier British-made films sound quite interesting and some have fantastic casts. I have put "Time Without Pity" in my Netflix queue. Michael Redgrave, Leo McKern, Add Todd, Peter Cushing, Alec McCowen, Joan Plowright--see what I mean?

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