The dozen best English organized crime movies (and 5 best noirs)
Jan 07 '09 (Updated May 20 '09)
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While less the fully engaged with the allegedly great (15th on the 1999 BFI list of greatest British movies list), supposed noir 1947 "Brighton Rock," based on a novel by Graham Greene, it was inevitable that I would think of the genuinely great "The Third Man," (1949), written for the screen by the same Graham Greene.
While questioning that "Brighton Rock," which is mostly diurnal and not all that urban, is a "noir," I moved on to trying to make a list of great English noirs. I could, however, only come up with three:
"The Third Man" (1949), directed by Carol Reed, which topped the BFI list as the greatest British film ever, which was filmed in Vienna with the leads played by two Americans (Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles) and an Italian (Alida Valli),
"Night and the City" (1950) directed by American born political refugee Jules Dassin, starring Americans Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney, which was set in seedy London locales,
and "Odd Man Out" (1947), also directed by Carol Reed, with a very bleak and menacing black-and-white nocturnal atmosphere, and genuinely English stars, James Mason and Robert Newton. It is set in Belfast, and the English stars are playing Irish members of the Irish Republican Army... and noirs usually feature crimes that are not classified as terrorist acts, though robberies are certainly involved in many.
I could not go much farther than those three indisputably great movies in making my list. "5 Fingers" (1952), also starring James Mason came to mind, but aside from being directed by quintessential Hollywood master Joseph L. Mankiewicz, costarring Danielle Darrieux, and being set in Turkey, it is clearly a "spy movie." I'd say that the first (1958) adaptation of Graham Greene's The Quiet American is also a "spy movie," if I had to specify its genre, though the moral dissolution of the Michael Redgrave character and the very strong menace of the visuals lensed by Robert Krasker (who also shot "The Third Man" and "Odd Man Out"), the generally nocturnal settings of the movie, and mostly urban setting) make it possible to conceive of as a noir.
So that is my list of the five best English noirs — with some recurring names (Greene, Krasker, Reed, Mankiewicz, Mason).
Perhaps I could have fluffed out this list with some neo-noirs, but can reach ten more easily for "organized crime movies" rather than "best noirs." My list of noirs provides the kernel — and top — of my list of English organized crime movies (giving up the two ambiguously American Mankiewicz movies.)
If I considered the IRA an "organizes crime" syndicate, a classification with which British authorities would concur, I could keep "Odd Man Out" and add Neil Jordan's "The Crying Game" (1992) in which Miranda Richardson fits very neatly into the gang enforcer role (and trying to get out as Stephen Rea's character does, is a recurrent plot line of gangster movies, along with the kidnapping (there of Forrest Whitaker)). Including this is complicated not only by classifying the IRA, but by Neil Jordan being very Irish, though most of the movie is set in London and the part set in Ireland centers on a kidnapped English soldier.
Sharing a transgendered love interest with "The Crying Games," Jordan's earlier (1986) "Mona Lisa." She (Cathy Tyson) is a prostitute, and prostitution is often controlled by gangsters. And the ex-con (played by Bob Hoskins)who aids and tries to protect her was certainly a low-level gangster thug before going to prison.
Michael Caine played the crime boss in "Mona Lisa" (and later took on the role Michael Redgrave had played in a remake of "The Quiet Man"). Caine's great gangster role was in "Get Carter" (the 1971 version), directed by Mike Hodges. Jack Carter is a professional killer, who turns to investigating and avenging his slain brother. Caine is very debonair and very tough in "Get Carter," as in "Mona Lisa."
Hoskins appeared in a contender for this list, the original (1980) "The Long Good Friday," directed by John Mackenzie. Hoskins is great, Helen Mirren is as least good as his moll, and there is a lot of violence. Like "Get Carter," "The Long Good Friday" is a whodunit in gangster costumes.
Because of a great turn as an aging gangster in pursuit of his daughter's killer by Terrence Stamp, I'd like to include "The Limey," but the setting is LA and it was directed by Steven Soderbergh, so disqualified as being "American" even with scenes from Ken Loach's "Poor Cow" (with a young Stamp) spliced in.
Instead, I can include Stephen Frears's little-known "The Hit" (1984) in which Stamp plays a retired gangster. As usual, gangster is not an occupation allowing for retirement. His character's good life in Spain (prefiguring "Sexy Beat" except a much better movie IMO) is interrupted by two gunmen sent by those whom he betrayed on his way out, played with menacing style by Tim Roth and John Hurt.
I considered including "A Clockwork Orange" (1971), based on a novel by Anthony Burgess and directed by long-expatriated-to-England Stanley Kubrick. Malcolm McDowell plays a thug who is thuggish with others, but the still-controversial movie does not seem to me about "organized crime." Rather I recall it as being about individual pathology and sci-fi reprogramming.
A movie I liked a lot involving a criminal past (primarily that of the title character's manipulative father) is "Croupier" (1998), which made Clive Owen a star in the title role. It is partly a heist movie, and Jack Manfred (Owen) is neither a professional criminal or someone investigating organized crime: he's just an interestingly conflicted child of a gangster (as Michael Corleone was in the first half of "Godfather I", right?).
Reaching back, it's impossible not to include two Alec Guiness black comedies "The Lavender Hill Mob" (1951, directed by Charles Crichton) and "The Lady Killers" (1955, Alexander Mackendrick), both of which made it onto the BFI list of greatest British films' top twenty. The inept mobsters of The Lady Killers" (including Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom, as well as Guiness) are comically foiled by a clueless little old lady played by Katie Johnson, who believes the criminals are meeting to play chamber music. "Ladykillers" was shot in color, "The Lavender Hill Mob" in un-noirish black-and-white. I like "The Lavender Hill Mob" more than Guiness's multi-character-taking, multi-murder "Kind Hearts and Coronets." I have my doubts about whether the meek bank clerk who plans a daring crime played by Guiness counts as being part of "organized crime." He organizes a crime, but the rationale for not disqualifying it is that he hires some thugs (not very bright ones might go without saying...) Guiness of the early 1950s was very funny playing schemers.
And he also appeared as Fagan, the stereotypical Jewish organizer of child criminals in David Lean's adaptation of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (the movie musical version of which, "Oliver!", won an Oscar for Carol Reed, whose name has not been mentioned for a few paragraphs). The arch-criminal, the murderous Bill Sikes was played by Robert Newton (with John Howard Davies playing young Oliver Twist). An escaping criminal (George Hayes) plays a mostly offscreen part in Pip's rise in the 1946 Lean adaptation of Dickens's Great Expectations (in which Guiness also appeared), but that could not be considered an organized crime movie, despite the criminal basis of the wealth that comes to Pip (John Mills).
If "Oliver Twist" is an "organized crime movie," so must "The Beggar's Opera" be (a source directly of "The Three-Penny Opera" and at least indirectly of Oliver Twist's world of adult criminals). As MacHeath (who is a narrator rather like "Richard III," a role he also played around that time), Laurence Olivier is very entertaining in the 1953 movie directed by legendar stage experimental director Peter Brook (who also filmed "Lord of the Flies" and "Marat/Sade").
Other contenders
The heist comedy starring Michael Caine, "The Italian Job" (1969 and "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead" (2003, directed by Mike Hodges with another "Out of the Past" return, this time afflicting Clive Owen did not much impress me. I loathed "Sexy Beast" (2000), even though I'd have to admit that the brutal an obcenity-spouting Ben Kingsley was very good in it. (I much prefer him in the more recent and non-English "TransSiberian" and "You Kill Me.") And I was disappointed by "Brighton Rock" (for any who have read this far and forgotten my starting point!). Calvacanti's (1947) "They Made Me a Fugitive" has a particularly nasty gang leader played by Griffith Jones and excellent noir photography by Otto Heller along with a tough antagonist played by Trevor Howard. I find its pace too slow.
I have not seen "Snatch" (2000, Guy Ritchie) or "Layer Cake" (2004, Matthew Vaughan), two movies that have impressed others.
In that smuggling is archetypal "organized crime," I should consider Carol Reed's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Outcast of the Islands with Trevor Howard outfoxing Robert Morley in some Southeast Asian setting. The organized crime aspect seems too peripheral, however (as for "A Clockwork Orange.")
Hunkering down to rank-ordering
Since "The Third Man" tops so many lists, I'm tempted to put "Odd Man Out" in the top spot, but "The Third Man" is one of my favorite anti-romantic movies. (Although the primary theme, as in "The Quiet American" may be the danger of see-no-evil Americans loose in the world, in trying to find out what happened to his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) is forced by Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) to realize that the cover-up of Lime's disappearance is tied to the very organized pilfering and black market sales of penicillin.) And "Odd Man Out" is to my mind more a "chase movie" (a particularly relentless one) than about "organized crime." And despite its location, "Night and the City" is more open to question of whether it is "English" than "The Third Man" is.
The obligatory rank-ordering of the top dozen English organized crime movies:
The Third Man
Night and the City
Odd Man Out
The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers
Oliver Twist
Mona Lisa
Croupier
The Hit
The Crying Game
The Beggars Opera
Get Carter
(An alternative way to reduce the list to ten insead of lopping off the bottom two, is to eliminate the two IRA ones.)
And a special prize as the greatest English noir photographer to Robert Krasker (1913-81), who also shot Terrence Stamp as "Billy Budd" for Peter Ustinov's spendid Melville adaptation, blacklisted exile Joseph Losey's "The Criminal," and The Fall of the Roman Empire and The Heroes of Telemark for Anthony Mann.
Also see my more extensive list of best French organized crime movies, split between heist films and hunted man ones. And Sue reminded me that I have posted a list of best noirs, too.
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