Brighton Rock

In John Boulting’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s Catholic-imbued crime novel, Brighton Rock, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity find form in the naive Rose (Nancy Marsh), the soft-spoken seventeen-year-old who falls in love with the violent, selfish, undeserving Pinkie Brown (Richard Attenborough) and stands by patiently as he humiliates her and plots her death. Possessing the volatile temperament of a James Cagney character, a switchblade his weapon of choice, Pinkie heads a gang of racketeers in the resort town of Brighton, their ostensible headquarters a dilapidated tenement building where more action takes place in the stairwell (drama heightened by plenty of high camera angles) than inside the drab apartments. Hermione Baddeley plays Ida Arnold, a tough, over-the-hill pub singer who suspects Pinkie of murdering a man she’d met at the fairgrounds who showed up dead just hours later, and William Hartnell plays Dallow, a gangster with a heart. The film’s pacing never lets up, aided by May’s often dramatic score that accelerates action, particularly chase scenes, with intensifying rhythm, and Boulting composes scenes using both the bustling Brighton settings and the cold, gray interiors for maximum dramatic effect: note the innovative haunted house ride sequence or the fall over a banister which results in the victim’s body gorgeously reflected in a ceiling mirror.