Tag: Simon Rumley

Once Upon a Time in London

Posted on by victorfraga

Charting the fates of two very different criminals from the late 30s to the early 60s, Once Upon a Time in London transports the thirties’ Chicago gangster tale to the East End. A quintessentially British tale stacked with the usual assortment of English geezers, which also brings a unique historical depth to an otherwise well-worn genre.

It all kicks off in 1936 at the infamous Battle of Cable Street, a street-fight between anti-fascists — including communists, Jews and Irish dockers — and Blackshirts, led by Oswald Mosley. The leader on the Jewish side (although history suggests he wasn’t actually there) is notorious gangster Jack Comer (Terry Stone). He is so influential in the East End that he successfully wins the fight, forcing Mosley to retire his troops. Meanwhile, Billy Hill (Leo Gregory) is just getting started: a cocky young upstart, he robs the same jewellery shop twice in one week just for fun.

He owes money to the Whites, who are in opposition to the Italian Sabinis. But when the Sabinis are detained due to the government’s wartime policy, a power vacuum quickly opens up, leading Comer to take control of the underworld. Hill, currently in jail, senses an opportunity, and sends Comer a letter asking for work. Of course, Hill isn’t really looking for employment, but a way to worm his way to the very top.

The result is a predictable albeit entertaining romp through various gangster clichés that is too complicated for its own good. Not content to merely depict one or two rivalries, it shows us several, rushing through the years at a breakneck pace. Given that it is only 110 minutes long, the film feels overstuffed, never giving us time to breathe. Characters die suddenly, often off-screen, go to jail and back within five minutes, and get beaten up only to have their revenge moments later. It would’ve done far better to either extend the runtime — giving us the Leone-esque epic the title deserves — or start in the fifties at the heat of the two men’s rivalry. Instead we get a solid hour and a half of laborious place-setting before a quick half hour resolution.

Additionally, the production design feels strained, dampening the character’s personalities instead of bringing them to life. While even the worst modern ‘geezer’ pictures can be guiltily pleasurable thanks to contemporary soundtracks and shameless depictions of excess, the historical context of Once Upon A Time In London sanitises the worst of it, making it feel all rather stale. The ways in which government policy and organised crime intersected during the war, or the media promoted criminals such as Hill to the top of pile, is truly fascinating, but this isn’t explored with much depth.

We come to these films for their violence and what it says about man’s worst tendencies. Once Upon A Time in London contains many such violent moments — including one man’s face being used for a dartboard — but they never manage to land with any real force. Director Simon Rumley has the tendency to score the most brutal of beatings with music from the time, cutting out the sounds of blows entirely. This is symptomatic of the film as a whole: which rarely pulls a punch.

While the acting is serviceable (with Stone standing out as a ruthless crime baron) they are ultimately let down by a run-of-the-mill script, subpar direction and endless diversions. Although containing some fascinating ideas, and a side to British criminal history that is under-portrayed compared to the Swinging Sixties and Cocaine Eighties, Once Upon A Time In London barely compares to Once Upon a The Time in The Midlands (Shane Meadows, 2002).

Once Upon a Time in London is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, April 19th. On Netflix from January 11th, 2020.

Crowhurst

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

So you’ve seen The Mercy (James Marsh, 2018) – or perhaps after reading our three star review you passed. And now, a few weeks later, timed likewise to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of 1968’s Sunday Times Golden Globe round the world boat race, along comes Crowhurst, a second telling of the same historical episode. Should you bother with Crowhurst? The answer, whether or not you saw its higher-profile rival, is most emphatically yes.

It’s such a great story – British underdog and amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst enters the race hoping to win the prize money which will extricate him and his business from severe financial difficulty. He signs a deal with a backer that will destroy him if he doesn’t win. As competitors drop out, it looks as if he’ll make the fastest time. But his voyage is based on deceit – he’s not circumnavigated the world at all and his logbooks won’t stand the scrutiny a winner would receive. His boat turns up without him on board somewhere off the Cayman Islands. His diaries are there – but Crowhurst has disappeared, never to be seen again.

The other was the medium-sized feature with big-name stars and expansive locations. Rumley’s version – like its eponymous hero played with pluck by Justin Salinger – is the low budget outsider entry competing against impossible odds. Crowhurst comes with unfamiliar actors and is shot on land in England and at sea in the Bristol Channel doubling for vaster, international waters. (In something of a coup, the scenes in Crowhurst’s family home are shot in the real-life Crowhurst family home.) With that low price tag comes artistic freedom. No quarter is given to marketing demographics. Rumley goes for his own idiosyncratic take on events. His film is all the better for it.

Lacking the budget for exotic seascape locations, Rumley zeroes in on the inside of his protagonist’s head as impossible events conspire against Donald and he begins to fall apart. He imagines a live fish out of water trying to survive inside his cabin, on one occasion making a racket trapped inside his first aid box. There is ultimately no way out and with each closing loophole the images become increasingly fragmented and the photography more and more bleached.

Intermittent broadcast TV scenarios explain how one at a time his rivals are dropping out of the race, but they seem very distant and Crowhurst is about the trapped Donald, not them. So too with the other major players – wife Clare (Amy Laughton) and four kids, overbearing and grotesque press agent Rodney Hallworth (Christopher Hale), shrewd backer Stanley Best (Glyn Dilley) whose watertight contract Donald signed. All seem distant, as if in a dream. Or a nightmare. From which Crowhurst will never wake.

As the wide-open sea gives way to close in on the cabin, Donald’s surroundings become increasingly claustrophobic. He believes himself transcendent in his delusion. He becomes convinced he can control everything. A scribbling biro gouges a hole in a map. Eventually, he utters the last words from his diary: “It is finished. It is finished. It is… The Mercy.” In the film of that name, those lines seem vague, lost. In Crowhurst, they represent the full blown end of an irrevocable descent into madness and, by implication, death.

Threaded through this terrible downward trajectory are songs familiar to every Englishman or woman: Land Of Hope And Glory, Silent Night, God Save The Queen. It elicits subliminal nationalist, Christian and monarchist songs delivered as dirges, widespread inculcated beliefs reduced to superficial nursery rhymes; an entire national psyche rendered redundant. These days, the world has moved on.

Crowhurst is out in the UK in March. Out on VoD in October.