![]() ![]() ![]() All of this – the Catholic guilt, the dread of capital punishment, the innocence of Rose – wouldn’t play well on the other side of the 1960s youth revolution. He courts and marries naive local waitress Rose (an excellent Andrea Riseborough), an accidental witness to his crime, simply so she can’t testify against him in court. Pinkie is a murderer whose Catholic faith and fear of hell and damnation make him dread the death penalty. Joffe’s moving of the story to 1964 is a fair enough cry for originality on his part, but it’s also a tacit admission that you can’t move Greene’s story any further forward in time without changing it radically. The original film starred Richard Attenborough as amoral seaside crim Pinkie Brown, and here a brooding Sam Riley (Ian Curtis in ‘Control’) takes the lead, only now mods and rockers are hassling the deckchair crowd by fighting on the seafront and the death penalty has just one year left to run it course. What Rowan Joffe has done with this bold and intelligent, if flawed and maybe a little doomed (like Pinkie’s poor old Rose), remake is to go back to both the 1938 book and 1947 noir and transfer many of their elements from Brighton in the 1930s to the same town in 1964. ![]() ![]() It’s easy to get dewy-eyed over a great old novel and film like ‘Brighton Rock’ and shriek when you hear that a young pretender is remaking it and – sacre bleu! – setting it in another period. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |