Joseph Losey (1960)

You soon know what you’re in for.  The introductory shots of the prison and the opening exchanges among the inmates are, respectively, portentous and overemphatic (with Robert Krasker’s camera close in on the actors).  Joseph Losey takes no time to establish the place and the peopIe in a realistic way – it’s clear from the word go that he’s intent on making an important statement about prison as an institution.  Because the trio playing cards in the first scene includes Murray Melvin, who lets us see his native eccentricity without pushing it at us, I was briefly optimistic that the gratingly insistent playing of the other two men might be an aberration but it was evident within a very few minutes – after several more spasms of overdone character acting – that Melvin was the odd man out.   There are some congenitally crude performers in The Criminal (one of the other card players is Patrick Wymark) but some of the cast are not as bad as Losey has directed them to be.

The picture isn’t long (97 minutes) but would be nearly unwatchable without Stanley Baker in the main role of the eponymous criminal, Johnny Bannion, released from prison half an hour into the film and back inside half an hour later after being shopped following a robbery at a racecourse.  Baker isn’t the subtlest of actors but he’s physically ideal for this part – handsome, tough face, a suggestion of real bodily strength and potential violence, and, when Johnny’s on the outside, the ability to wear his natty clothes with style.   Baker also has the instinct and good taste to try and get inside Johnny, instead of interpreting him as part of the social critique.  There aren’t many people worth watching apart from Baker (and Melvin, in his small role).  Patrick Magee, as a prison guard, inevitably makes an impression but, as usual (in my experience), it’s a ludicrous one:  he’s irredeemably fey and a good deal more homicidal than any of the prisoners.  (Magee does have one genuinely strong moment, when we see him spiritually transported during a religious service in the prison.)  Sam Wanamaker’s presence in the cast has a political resonance beyond the story (like Losey, he was blacklisted in Hollywood in the early 1950s) but he’s not good:  he’s overeager and, unlike Baker, seems to be commenting on, rather than inhabiting, the crook he’s playing.  It’s no surprise that the beautiful Margit Saad, as the girl Johnny comes to love, hasn’t been much heard of since.  As one of the (many) Irish prisoners in the jail, that striking actor Neil McCarthy (a very good Joe Gargery in a BBC adaptation of Great Expectations later in the decade) comes through.

You root for Johnny Bannion not because of the character that Stanley Baker creates but because he’s giving an honourable performance.  When Johnny gets released from jail, I hoped he would locate a world where people didn’t overact the way they did inside but no such luck.   On the evening of his release, his friends have organised a party for Johnny at his flat.  Losey, through what seems to be a remarkably sexist perspective, has the (few) women guests overact being drunk – they sway and totter, collapse and writhe decoratively around the men’s feet.  That is until Jill Bennett, as an old flame of Johnny’s, arrives:  she’s self-possessed, icily alluring.  It’s an effective entrance but within a few lines Bennett has turned hysterical enough to upstage everyone around her.  Most of the accents at this gathering sound very middle-clarse – whether intentionally or not isn’t clear – but the whole sequence is just as overwrought as the prison scenes and to the same effect.  Losey can’t show a prison as a community or a party as a gathering of human beings and trust the audience to infer larger social meanings.  He has to force each milieu into an illustration of some larger societal malaise.  He fails to make the situation believable at any level – as a result, he fails to make it matter.  The party sequence calls to mind a Fellini without imagination or wit – and with a leaden social message to replace those qualities.  The Criminal exhibits essentially the same defect as The Boy with Green Hair, which Losey made twelve years earlier:  his concentration on scoring political points makes for a picture that’s bombastic but lifeless as drama.

The Criminal may have seemed daringly edgy and modern at the time (although it’s hard to believe).   It has a jazz score by Johnny Dankworth and a ‘prison ballad’ (which, for better or worse, has stayed with me more than a week after seeing the film), sung by Cleo Laine.   There are semi-pornographic paintings on the walls of Johnny’s flat and a brief (clumsy) flash of female nudity.    The ineffectual prison governor reads the New Statesman (this gives an idea of the level of political satire at which Losey and the writer Alun Owen are operating).   Johnny is presented as an individual struggling hopelessly against the power of the particular corporate world of which he is part.  It’s striking – given that the picture seems to have been noticed as a Searing Indictment of the prison system of the time – that this theme eclipses the issue of Johnny’s recidivism, which doesn’t appear to be blamed on ‘the system’.   For all its modernist emblems, the film has some bits which are laughably inept – not least the racecourse heist.  The producer Nat Cohen may have owned the 1962 Grand National winner Kilmore but that doesn’t prevent our seeing a sequence in which horses are jumping fences and hurdles in the same race.  It looks to be good going (the sequences appear to have been shot at Sandown or Kempton) but, when Johnny makes his getaway from the course, he’s immediately in a landscape which is well and truly snowbound.

14 June 2009