Peter Medak (1991)
There was never any doubt that Derek Bentley didn’t fire the shot that killed PC Sidney Miles, when the police interrupted an attempted warehouse burglary in Croydon on the night of 2 November 1952. The gunman was evidently Christopher Craig, who was only sixteen at the time and too young to be hanged. Nineteen-year-old Bentley wasn’t too young for capital punishment, even though his mental age was reckoned to be around eleven. Craig was the senior partner in crime and the case against him seemed clear cut. Bentley was certainly an accomplice in trying to burgle the warehouse of the Barlow & Parker confectionery company. The issue in doubt, when the pair stood trial at the Old Bailey in December 1952, was whether Bentley was also an accomplice in the murder of PC Miles – in particular, whether he’d incited Craig to shoot by calling out, ‘Let him have it, Chris’, as was claimed by other police officers present at the scene. Bentley and Craig denied these words were ever used.
The jury took little more than an hour to find both defendants guilty of murder although, in Bentley’s case, with a recommendation for mercy. The trial judge, Lord Goddard, sentenced Craig to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure and Bentley to death. An appeal was unsuccessful. The Home Secretary declined to recommend that the Queen exercise the royal prerogative of mercy to commute Bentley’s sentence to life imprisonment. He was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on 28 January 1953. Iris Bentley tried for decades to get posthumous justice for her brother. In July 1993, more than forty years after his execution, Derek Bentley was granted a royal pardon in respect of the death sentence passed on him and carried out – but the pardon wasn’t tantamount to a quashing of Bentley’s murder conviction. The Court of Appeal eventually quashed the conviction five years later, on 30 July 1998. Iris Bentley had died the previous year. When Let Him Have It was made, it therefore had potential value as a reminder of a long-standing miscarriage of justice and as a contribution to the campaign to clear Bentley’s name. In 1991, this may have constrained criticism of the film as a piece of drama. It’s hard to be so indulgent now.
The best-known book about the case was published in 1971. David Yallop’s To Encourage the Others, taking its title from Voltaire’s Candide, argued that Bentley’s punishment had a political significance and an exemplary intention, at a time of much public concern about increasing crime rates. Lord Goddard, who served as Lord Chief Justice from 1946 to 1958 and continued to argue for stiff sentencing, referred during Craig and Bentley’s trial to the rising tide of lawlessness, attempts to connect this to the influence on English youth of American gangster pictures, and so on. On the basis of disputed ballistics evidence, David Yallop’s book also cast doubt on whether the bullet that killed Sidney Miles came from Craig’s gun. In Let Him Have It, the director Peter Medak and the writing duo of Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (best known nowadays for James Bond screenplays) push Yallop’s pour encourager les autres argument but are explicit that Craig fired the fatal shot. His trigger-happy antics on the warehouse roof are the culmination of the film’s presentation of Craig as a thoroughly nasty piece of work. This approach makes for an awkward moral structure: the director and his screenwriters change villains in midstream. We notice a poster outside a Croydon cinema for White Heat (although it was released two years before the events being described in Let Him Have It). On the night of the killing, a couple of Craig’s hoodlum pals opt for a Tony Curtis picture in preference to burglary. There’s little acknowledgement, however, that Craig, as much as anyone else, was a product of the economic and cultural conditions of his time. In Paul Reynolds’s noisy, hollow playing of him, he’s simply a vicious, arrogant psycho, who does for Derek Bentley – until the British state takes over that job in the second part of the film.
Because Bentley’s name hadn’t been cleared at the time, it’s understandable – even right-minded – that he’s the focus of Let Him Have It throughout. This brings problems, though, because of the personality that Bentley was. Just a few months before the film was released, Christopher Eccleston had given a fine performance on television as another young man with learning difficulties, in Second Time Around, the best of the Inspector Morse mysteries, but that role, though important in the story, was a relatively small one in terms of screen time. As Bentley, Eccleston is good at suggesting someone whose brain rarely allows him to understand, let alone articulate, his feelings. It’s nice too to see this actor’s face before it stiffened into the clenched, grim mask that became his trademark in subsequent television roles. But Bentley’s limited expressive resources mean the performance is almost inevitably repetitive, and Eccleston’s speech rhythms sometimes suggest, unfortunately, Private Pike. It looks as if the costume designer, Pam Tait, has designed his outfits on the basis of photographs of the real Derek Bentley but the effect is to make Eccleston wrongly imposing. Although he’s not exceptionally tall, there are moments when – in the company of the shorter actors playing Craig and co, in their mobster suits and hats – Eccleston looks like an adult who’s strayed onto the set of Bugsy Malone. If the film were made now, it might work better to have Craig as the main character in the early stages (although you’d need someone better than Paul Reynolds in the role). There might be a stronger dramatic and ironic impact if Bentley started off as a peripheral, incongruous figure but eventually became the man in the condemned cell. As it is, Peter Medak’s characterisation of him as victim and Craig as lucky survivor is crudely thoroughgoing. At the Old Bailey, Bentley still has the remains of a black eye and cuts on his face, from being roughed up on his arrest a month previously. Craig’s arm is in a sling but he struts to the witness box – a remarkably swift recovery from the fractured spine he suffered when, out of ammunition, he jumped from the roof of the warehouse and fell through a greenhouse thirty feet below.
Peter Medak takes an age to get to the night of the crime and that time isn’t well spent. Bentley’s parents’ supervision of what Derek gets up to outside the family home is unconvincingly (though conveniently) erratic. There’s a corny subplot involving Christopher Craig’s criminal elder brother (Mark McGann suggests that overacting is in the Craig genes). And Medak’s evocation of working-class life in Croydon in the years of post-war austerity is poor. The settings always look like sets and the colouring and scale of the images aren’t right: the cinematographer, Oliver Stapleton, gives the exteriors too much light and space. These faults are naturally reduced in the night-time sequences but the warehouse stand-off in the dark is badly staged. It’s true that police reinforcements arrived midway through – PC Miles was part of them – but the number of officers seems excessive; and an improbably large crowd gathers to watch the spectacle.
Once he and Craig have been arrested, Bentley’s parents’ and sister’s reactions to this, and to what follows, are attenuated, generic clichés – frustrating when so much time was devoted to family life in the film’s first hour. I liked a shot of the street where the Bentleys live, as dawn breaks on the morning when Derek will be hanged and a milkman does his rounds. This unstressed but eloquent image – just another day, a day like no other – is almost immediately undermined by a sequence in which the postman comes up the same street and hands a single envelope to Derek’s father (‘Just the one today, Mr Bentley’) – as if the recent tidal wave of mail, supporting the family’s campaign for a reprieve, would stop like clockwork for the execution. (There was still a possibility of reprieve twenty-four hours earlier.) On the subject of clockwork: the cross-cutting around the chimes of the living-room clock, as it strikes nine and the hanging is carried out, is torturous in the wrong way. Purvis and Wade’s dialogue is frequently clumsy, never more so than when the police, arriving at the scene of the crime, ask the couple who phoned 999 if they know who holds a set of keys to the warehouse, and get the reply, ‘Down the road – second turning on the right’. (How would that locate an individual?)
Nearly twenty years after Derek Bentley’s name was cleared, it’s hard to find good things to say about Let Him Have It. It’s apt – in retrospect, a kind of tribute to Iris Bentley – that Claire Holman’s playing of her is nuanced and sure. Although the roles of the parents are primitively written, Tom Courtenay has a couple of emotionally potent moments as the father. Beside Holman and Courtenay, Eileen Atkins seems obvious and theatrical as Bentley’s mother. For every decent cameo (Michael Elphick as a sympathetic prison officer), there are plenty more that are shockers (especially Murray Melvin as a schoolteacher and Iain Cuthbertson as Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the Home Secretary). The Old Bailey scenes are sufficiently badly done to make reliably good actors like Michael Gough (Lord Goddard) and Karl Johnson (Craig’s counsel) seem like bad ones. The brisk, shockingly efficient execution sequence (with Clive Revill as Albert Pierrepoint) is relatively strong.
The film-makers have a dilemma over ‘Let him have it’. Their intention is entirely to exonerate Bentley, who denied saying it. On the other hand, it would be a pity to waste the phrase, which makes for a good title … The solution, of course, is the notorious ambiguity of those four words. If Bentley uttered them, he may have meant, ‘Give up the weapon, Chris’ (as his counsel argues) – and Christopher Eccleston’s reading of the line makes clear Bentley is urging his pal to surrender. This piece of calculation on the part of Medak and the writers may well reflect the truth of what really happened. It seems more likely than not that Bentley did say ‘Let him have it’ (and meant ‘Hand over the gun’). If he didn’t and the police made it up, why did they go for a form of words capable of such different interpretations?
22 March 2016