RED RIDING: 1974 directed by Julian Jarrold
A gnarled oak of a man (played by veteran character actor Warren Clarke), Molloy has clearly been on the case too long, and his statement of sympathy provokes such an uproar that his superiors decide to replace him. But his words hang over the entire trilogy, which portrays the West Yorkshire force as a cesspool of corruption and misogyny. men are the enemy reads a placard in one of the news photos that’s intercut with Molloy’s broadcast. it could be the man next door, reads another. Indeed, what makes these movies so unnerving is that their evil seems to reach well past the killers and even the West Yorkshire police, into the soul of every man. You’d be hard pressed to find a female character in any of the movies who doesn’t suffer at the hands of men; a vicious hatred of women slithers through the trilogy like a serpent, and even the most well-meaning of men are too flawed to defend them.
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The “Red Riding” trilogy is greater than the sum of its parts—and much greater than the busy and unsatisfying Red Riding: 1983. Heavy with flashbacks, this last installment returns to the child killings of the first movie, which have suddenly resumed in 1983 with the disappearance of a fourth little girl. Screenwriter Tony Grisoni, whose scripts for the first two movies are nothing short of masterful, labors to wrap up the series with a steady stream of plot developments and splinters the story line even further by jumping back and forth between two different protagonists. One of them, familiar from the first two movies, is Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), a guilt-ridden West Yorkshire cop who’s determined to solve the murders at long last, regardless of what this will mean for the force; the other, a new addition, is John Piggott (Mark Addy), a dissolute attorney who begins to suspect that his late father was involved in the killings.
