Director’s best shot at updating a noir classic of homicide beside the seaside

Rowan Joffe thought remaking Brighton Rock would be professional suicide. Then he found his muse in Sam Riley. Film Critic Tony Earnshaw reports.

Graham Greene always claimed that the pre-war seaside race gangs that formed the basis of Brighton Rock were already a thing of the past by the time his melancholy novella was published in 1938.

In fact the Boulting Brothers’ film – so shocking on its release in 1947 – was careful enough to present a disclaimer advising that the dingy town depicted on the cinema screen was “another Brighton of dark alleyways and festering slums... of crime and violence and gang warfare... now happily no more.”

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A shared exemplar of that narrow genre known as “British noir”, book and movie exposed the truth of Britain’s damned youth via the figure of a razor-happy English gangster who drifts towards death even as he meanders through a kind of life.

Brighton Rock is about young people. Greene’s story was published when he was just 34. And the monstrous teenage hoodlum at its core was played by Richard Attenborough when he was just 23.

Yet there is the look of ages in Attenborough’s slatey eyes – the deathly, dead-eyed stare of a young man old before his time as he gazes across the bleak wasteland of his existence.

On the page and on the cinema screen Greene created a claustrophobic partnership between a 17-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl that was, as David Thomson observed, “a study in good and evil, innocence and infantile depravity”.

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Brighton in 1938 was a drab, vulgar seaside town – the perfect milieu, then, for a psychopathic delinquent to run amok with a cutthroat razor in his hand. Nine years on and post-war England had a new breed of sinister underclass in the spivs.

Pinkie Brown was a wholly believable hybrid of the two: a frightened, fear-fuelled man-child and a morally corrupt, cold-hearted killer with ambitions beyond his understanding of the world in which he existed.

At the heart of Brighton Rock is the toxic distortion of the ideals of love and romance: murderer Pinkie takes up with, seduces and finally marries an artless waitress (Carol Marsh) because she knows too much. Cruel but cowardly, Pinkie (originally played by Attenborough on stage) eventually sinks into the abyss leaving widow Rose with a scratched record that jumps, forever repeating the words “I love you”.

The film defined an era, provided Attenborough with an unforgettable breakthrough and proved the Brits could more than match their Stateside cousins when it came to gritty crime thrillers. To many it is untouchable. Not to Rowan Joffe.

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It is Joffe who, at 38, has done what many would not and attempted a new adaptation of Brighton Rock. In doing so he has re-imagined Greene’s iconic tale, retaining the south coast setting but shifting forward the timeline so that Pinkie woos his dowdy, unsuspecting moll against the background of the 1964 seaside riots of the Mods and the Rockers.

“The film is emphatically not a remake,” says Joffe by way of introduction. “I hate remakes and I would never do one. I simply think that if the novel is a work of great literature, which I believe it is – maybe one of the greatest of the 20th-century – then it’s worthy of more than one adaptation, just like a Shakespeare play. That was the basis on which I perhaps rather foolishly went into this.”

The passage of time and the relaxation of censorship laws allowed Joffe to explore more of the murky complexity of Greene’s story. Thus he incorporates into his version something of the violence and deviant sexual (and sensual) aspects of the novel. The ever-present mood of change in 1960s Britain gave Joffe “a very carefully thought-out era in which to transpose the story”.

He adds: “Far from eroding Pinkie I think what the ‘60s does is frame a story about youth rebellion which is to my mind what is so prescient about Greene’s novel.”

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Richard Attenborough had already enjoyed a handful of film roles for directors like Noel Coward, David Lean, Michael Powell and Peter Ustinov when he played Pinkie. Who, then, would be prepared to attempt to eclipse his satanic menace and schoolboy precociousness?

Step forward Sam Riley, the 31-year-old Yorkshireman who, like the stars of old, had been plucked from obscurity to play doomed punk Ian Curtis in 2007’s Control.

“My first reaction was, ‘Are they just wanting to do Brighton Rock meets Heartbeat or something?’” quips the wiry, 6ft 1ins Riley.

Born in Leeds, educated at Uppingham School in Rutland and now living in Berlin with Alexandra Maria Lara, the German actress he met while working on Control, Riley retains his Yorkshire accent.

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Rejected by RADA as too inexperienced and by LAMDA when he forgot his lines during an audition, Riley has no formal acting training. Yet his plausibility was apparent to Joffe as soon as he walked through the door.

“The biggest fear I had when I was writing and as we began casting was that I wouldn’t find a Pinkie,” recalls Joffe.

“Sam is an actor unlike any other English actor alive today, someone with all the charisma and good looks of Alain Delon. But he’s also got a kind of edge and a mischief and occasionally a demonic ability, too. There’s something wonderfully shrewd and manipulative about Pinkie that Sam has managed to deliver.”

Says Riley: “If I could pick a part, I think most young guys would say exactly the same thing: you’d play someone that’s not particularly sympathetic, wearing fantastic suits with a scar on your face, a flick knife and a bottle of acid in your pocket. I get to cut up John Hurt... I was in hog heaven.”

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Riley and the super-prepared, much researched Joffe enjoyed two weeks’ rehearsal prior to beginning filming. Riley, cast opposite veterans such as Hurt and Helen Mirren, admits there were times when he might have got an attack of the jitters.

“There was a long scene on the pier that was five pages [of the script] and I was very nervous about doing that because I’d never really said anything in any movies I’d been in. I’ve sung or smoked, that’s my forte,” smiles Riley.

“Instead of shouting in front of everyone, he’d come up to me and say, ‘That was great but...’ and whisper it in my ear. Rowan gave me confidence that I knew what I was doing and that I wasn’t doing a bad job, which is the way I like to work. I don’t want anyone shouting at me, telling me I’m crap, to get me to cry. He did it in another way. There might be doubts beforehand and you think, ‘Oh my God’, but if you start thinking about that when you’re actually acting then you’re buggered.

“[During the read-through] I had to say to Helen (Mirren): ‘Leave us alone, you old bitch’. She just turned and said ‘Less of the old’. It completely threw me.” Riley, who will next be seen in an adaptation of Jack Keruoac’s On The Road, playing the autobiographical narrator Sal Paradise, may be doing pretty well for someone with no formal training, but he still sees himself as a novice, albeit one who knows a few tricks.

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“The character came alive when I read it and thought, ‘Yeah I could see myself doing that. I understood his ambition, even thought it’s a bit wayward. When I was in rehearsal in jeans and a hoodie, I never really felt like I was getting it, and then I put on the suit and slicked the hair down. It’s like dressing up. But then it’s easier to be the king when you’ve got the crown on your head.”

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