One of the most sensational crime stories ever to come out of Great Britain was the 1993 murder of two-year-old James Bulger by a pair of ten-year-old truants in the suburbs of Liverpool. The killers, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, spotted little James wandering unattended in a shopping center, walked him several miles to a railway line, tortured him, and bludgeoned him to death with an iron bar, dropping his body on the tracks so that his death might be attributed to a train. The crime touched a nerve in the U.S. as well as the UK—probably because, like most violent offenses perpetrated by minors, it violated our dearly held view of childhood as a time of innocence. After a judge sentenced the boys to ten years in prison, a British tabloid collected 280,000 signatures on a petition demanding more jail time for them. Here in the States, right-wing commentators began kicking around the concept of the “superpredator,” a new breed of feral street child who killed without remorse.
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British writer Graham Greene got a jump on this controversy back in 1938 when he published the classic crime novel Brighton Rock. Set in the seaside resort town of Brighton, it told the chilling tale of Pinkie Brown, a 17-year-old hood with ice water in his veins and a straight razor in his pocket. The junior member of a little crime outfit, Pinkie hungers for revenge after his mentor, Kite, is bumped off by a rival gang. Unable to get at them, he instead zeroes in on Hale, the man who ratted out Kite, and stalks him across town. Nowadays we’d probably consider Pinkie an adult, in temperament if not legal status. But back then, before the youth culture explosion of the 1950s and ’60s, readers would have been more inclined to regard Pinkie as only a boy. Greene takes ironic note of the character’s youth by having him murder Hale with a stick of hard candy—the Brighton Rock of the title, which Pinkie jams down the victim’s throat until he chokes to death.
Rowan Joffe, a British screenwriter (The American, 28 Weeks Later) debuting as director, hits some of these notes in his adaptation of Brighton Rock, but the movie’s religious flourishes seem more rhetorical than heartfelt. His big statement consists of moving the action up to spring 1964, when Brighton was invaded by mods and rockers who proceeded to kick the hell out of each other at the pier. If you’re familiar with this brief episode in English youth culture, you’ve probably listened to the Who’s overblown rock opera Quadrophenia or seen the excellent movie version of it directed by Frank Roddam in 1979. I’m still trying to figure out what mods have to do with Brighton Rock, and I can only guess that Joffe glommed onto the little town’s best known pop-culture credential in hope of connecting with a broader, or perhaps younger, international audience.
Directed by Rowan Joffe Landmark’s Century Centre
