Noir Diary # 16: The Criminal (Joseph Losey, 1960)

 Even before he achieved card-carrying ‘auteur’ status following his celebrated collaborations with Harold Pinter, Joseph Losey already had a long history of turning genre conventions outside out. Early American films like psychological noir ‘The Prowler’ (1951) and anti-war allegory ‘The Boy With Green Hair’ (1948) were already total one-offs, and, after the blacklist forced his relocation to the UK, he was soon busy turning humble crime programmer ‘Time Without Pity’ (1957) into an exhausting treatise on post-industrial anxiety, before instigating an unprecedented mash-up of JD youth movie, Kneale-esque science fiction and cold war existentialism in 1962’s extraordinary ‘The Damned’.

All of which makes it interesting to consider just how uncharacteristically normal Losey’s three early collaborations with iconic Welsh tough guy star Stanley Baker turned out to be. The first film they made together, 1959’s ‘Blind Date’ [hastily reviewed on this blog way back in the mists of time] is a stylish but unremarkable whodunit, whilst 1962’s ‘Eve’ [ditto] may have allowed Baker to stretch his thespian wings a little, but is otherwise just a frothy continental melodrama, feeling uncomfortably like a strained British attempt to catch a whiff of post-‘La Dolce Vita’ decadence.

By far the strongest entry in this loose trilogy, 1960’s ‘The Criminal’, is, as its title suggests, just about as generic a crime movie (gangster & prison sub-divisions) as can possibly be imagined. Credited to playwright and future ‘Hard Day’s Night’ screenwriter Alun Owen, from an original draft by Jimmy Sangster, the script manages to trot out a formidable assemblage of hoary old clichés, as Baker’s London-Irish mob boss Johnny Bannion drifts in and out of the slammer whilst punishing his enemies, executing an audacious racetrack heist, hiding the loot, instigating a passionate affair with his ex-girlfriend’s flatmate (Margit Saad), and eventually being betrayed by his trusted right hand man (Losey’s fellow ex-pat Sam Wanamaker).

Could it have been Baker himself who reined in Losey’s more outré tendencies on these projects, I wonder? After all, he got his parallel career as a producer of no nonsense action-adventure pictures off to a flying start with ‘Zulu’ (1964) just a few years later. Indeed, ‘The Criminal’ plays to a great extent like one of the projects its leading man went on to produce (not least the similarly themed ‘Robbery’ (1967)), mixing a sense of raw nerve energy with dour, realistic brutality, whilst showcasing the talents of an extraordinary cast of character players.

Whatever the behind-the-scenes balance of power may have been though, Losey’s presence can still be felt, especially during the film’s prison sequences, which were shot on a vast purpose-built set modelled after the Victorian edifice of HMP Wandsworth (the genuine article was used for exteriors). Though impressively realistic in most respects, this set allows Losey - aided no doubt by cinematographer Robert Krasker, a veteran of Carol Reed’s ‘Odd Man Out’ and ‘The Third Man’ - to frame the action in suitably expressionistic, Kafkaesque fashion, dialling up the claustrophobia to an uncomfortable degree as he obsessively explores the complex power dynamics at play between the inmates and wardens.

In this respect, it would be easy to file ‘The Criminal’ away as the UK’s answer to Jules Dassin’s ‘Brute Force’ (1947) or Jacques Becker’s ‘Le Trou’ (1960). A more relevant point of comparison however might be Raoul Walsh’s classic ‘White Heat’ (1949), which is echoed here in the ‘out-and-in-and-out-again’ structure of the prison story, as well as by the steady accumulation of tension through the film, the betrayal/paranioa tropes and the intermittent outbursts of vein-popping male hysteria.

More importantly for its director perhaps, ‘The Criminal’ also shares with Walsh’s film the underlying notion that its tormented, working class anti-hero never really gets to experience true freedom, finding himself imprisoned just as much by the strictures of the ruthless socio-economic system which defines his actions on the ‘outside’ as he is by the more literal bars and truncheons which confine him on the ‘inside’.

Unpacking all that would be quite enough to keep most filmmakers busy, but Losey, being Losey, also insists on intermittently trying to punch through to the audience via some woefully self-conscious application of Brechtian distancing technique.

This can be most clearly seen during the ‘home-coming’ party which follows Bannion’s initial release from prison, when all music and sound effects suddenly cut out to announce the entrance of his estranged girlfriend Maggie (Jill Bennett). As the assembled partygoers split off to either side and observe her subsequent hysterical outburst like a bemused Greek chorus, what should rightfully be a fairly troubling, low key character exchange is instead imbued with the feel of a ‘West Side Story’-esque ritual showdown. Later in the film meanwhile, an emotionally troubled prisoner is allowed to deliver a long, introspective monologue direct to camera, staring fixedly at the lens in close up as the background shifts out of focus behind him.

In fairness to Losey, he soon found other, better ways to imbue his characters with an inner life, and even managed to incorporate these jarring techniques into his later, more formally experimental, films to great effect. Here though, surrounded by the dour (albeit exaggerated) naturalism of London’s criminal underworld, these attention-grabbing cinematic affectations just seem absurd, bordering on camp - which is frankly the last thing anyone needed, in a movie which was still predicated largely on the simple pleasures of watching Stanley Baker punch people in the face.

Speaking of which, Baker may have railed against being typecast in ‘hard man’ parts in subsequent years (three films in five years with ‘Hell’ in the title will do that for you, I suppose), but for those of us who love the hard-boiled persona he brought to British crime/noir cinema of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, rest assured - we’re pretty much at Peak Stanley with ‘The Criminal’, and it’s beautiful thing to behold, even as he’s hamstrung to some extent by the necessity of slurring his trademark Welsh baritone to attempt some semblance of an Irish accent.

Essentially, Baker lends Johnny Bannion the feel of a man who, above all else, simply wants to be alone, but is cursed to be forever surrounded by other men (and even more troublingly, women) - scheming, wheedling and generally getting in his grill, 24/7. Left to his own devices, we assume, he’d be happy to remain in his outrageously decorated London penthouse, brooding over his impressive collection of jazz LPs; but alas, it’s not to be.

Lest we think we’re dealing with some Jean Gabin-esque sensitive, aesthetically-minded gangster here however, please note that Bannion has a life size photo of a nude model pasted on the back of his bathroom door, and when he is forced to resort to violence (which, of course, is frequently), there is a pure, underhanded street-fighting nastiness to his conduct which is genuinely frightening, whether belting a guard with his hand-cuffed wrists as makes an escape from a prison van, or (in one of the movie’s highlights) reducing a pair of hulking, feckless thugs who have been assigned as his cellmates to tearful agony in a matter of seconds.

Great as he is though, Baker is in constant danger of being upstaged by the rest of the ‘The Criminal’s top drawer cast of cinematic reprobates - not least BITR hero and Losey’s fellow Brechtian, Patrick Magee, getting stuck into one of his very best screen roles as the devilish-yet-craven Prison Warden, Barrows.

Venomous to a fault, Magee builds Barrows into a terrifying and fascinating figure, plumbing depths of weird perversity which I’m 99% sure the film’s script never thought to assign to him. One minute a cowering, authoritarian jobsworth, the next a Mephistophelian provocateur, Barrows seems to be perpetually attempting to stifle his true nature as a glowering sadist, but, he scarcely ever succeeds.

He can’t help addressing his underlings with a hissed, derisive “…mister”, making it sound like the disgusting insult imaginable, whilst the film’s opening sequence finds him pushing obviously-doomed stool pigeon Kelly (Kenneth Cope) down the steel steps to the prison mess hall with all the finality of a witch-hunter lighting a pyre.

Basically, you could write a whole treatise trying to get to the bottom of what makes this gimlet-eyed cur tick, and you’d still never quite get to the bottom of it. Magee’s every gesture appears to conceal some horrible, hidden purpose, and his scenes with Baker in particular crackle with an electrifying antagonism.

Elsewhere meanwhile, British horror fans will immediately feel at home as ‘The Criminal’ opens with the heart-warming sight of Patrick Wymark (‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’, ‘The Skull’) and Murray Melvin (‘The Devils’) enjoying an inevitably crooked game of poker, each looking almost impossibly shifty, and it’s likewise great to see such esteemed players as Tom Bell, Nigel Green and Rupert Davies popping up blink-and-you’ll-miss-it supporting roles. Each of these gents helps contribute to what must surely rank as one of British cinema’s most impressive gallery of villainous grotesques, creating a world so devoid of moral fortitude that Baker’s violent, self-serving antihero appears almost admirable by comparison.

For all this though, ‘The Criminal’ is also noteworthy as an example of a British film in which barely anyone on screen in actually English… well, not in the genealogically correct, WASP-centric manner which would have been recognised as such in the late 1950s, at least.

Bannion and most of his gang members are Irish, as, presumably, is Barrows, whilst the loosely allied gang (led by the affable Grégoire Aslan) who run the prison’s black market are Italian. In fact, it’s striking that, during a scene which takes place in the prison’s Roman Catholic chapel, pretty much our entire cast of characters - inmates and screws alike - are present, solemnly receiving communion!

The few ostensibly English inmates meanwhile tend to have prominent Northern accents, whilst all purpose thug ‘Clobber’ (played by Milton Reid lookalike Kenneth J. Warren, last seen around these parts in The Creeping Flesh) is Australian. As portrayed by the Jewish-American Wanamaker, the ethnicity of Bannion’s right-hand-man Carter is difficult to pin down, whilst Johnny’s girlfriend Suzanne, as played by Saad, is evidently German. In fact, the film’s the only definite, RP-enunciating southern Englishman is actually the haughty prisoner governor, marvellously played by Noel Willman (‘Kiss of the Vampire’, The Reptile).

A near-comically stern yet weak-willed exemplar of English good manners, everything in the tiny world of the governor’s office appears perfectly symmetrical. He is mildly perturbed when a dish of arrow-root biscuits accompanies his morning tea-tray (a cringing lackey apologises for the lack of digestives), seemingly oblivious to the violence, chaos and rampant corruption which define the defiantly heterogeneous community of incarcerated troublemakers beyond his door. 

Even more surprising is the notable presence of black characters in ‘The Criminal’. At the outset of the film, one of Bannion’s cellmates is a West-Indian - though seemingly not fluent in English, he seems a trusted ally nonetheless, communicating through ritual chants of “ok, sailor, ok”, along with the occasional patted shoulder - whilst, delightfully, Johnny’s cellblock also boasts a Sir Lancelot-esque calypso singer, who strums his guitar in the canteen, improvising new lyrics to reflect the prison’s latest dramas, in what seems like a homage to Jacques Tourneur’s ‘I Walked With a Zombie’ (1943). (1)

Elsewhere, during the racetrack scene, the camera briefly zeroes on a black man decked out in some kind of far-out witch doctor get-up (perhaps a real life hawker or busker of some kind?), whilst at Johnny’s home-coming party, we can even see a fully-fledged black gangster strutting his stuff in the background. (Probably not something the Krays or their bigoted ilk would have stood for, needless to say.)

Though not exactly the most progressive representations of black Britons ever seen on screen, the very presence of these characters in an era in which non-whites were generally entirely absent from popular cinema feels like a deliberate statement on the part of the filmmakers. Were they perhaps attempting to portray the criminal class as a kind of loose coalition of oppressed minorities, or just trying, however haphazardly, to provide a more realistic portrayal of working class life in the post-Wind Rush era than had usually been seen on screen up to this point..? Who knows.

Music too contributes hugely to ‘The Criminal’s overall power. In what became a recurring trope in Losey’s films, diegetic music is everywhere - not only in the myriad of songs, chants and rhymes through which the inmates communicate during the prison sequences, but also in Johnny’s prominently displayed jazz collection. As is almost inevitable for an early ‘60s Losey film in fact, UK jazz luminary Johnny Dankworth provides an exquisitely nuanced score, even as viewers are far more likely to remember the contribution made to the soundtrack by his better half, the equally ubiquitous Cleo Laine.

A striking, Nina Simone-ish, near a-cappella blues, Laine’s ‘Prison Ballad (Thieving Boy)’ plays over the film’s opening and closing sequences, and indeed is reprised a number of times in-between. You could accuse the filmmakers of over-playing this track, were it not for the fact that its haunting, icy simplicity proves so astoundingly beautiful that it stops us in out tracks each time it is heard.

Evoking a contemplative, melancholic air which eventually colours the entire film, Laine’s ballad allows this brutal, boot-to-the-face drama to veer, momentarily at least, toward the kind of fatalistic, stylised noir being explored at around the same time by directors in France and Japan.

Would it be too much of a stretch to claim that the snow-covered, rural locations in which the film’s predictably grim final act takes place reminded me of Truffaut’s ‘Tirez Sur Le Pianiste’ / ‘Shoot the Piano Player’, which premiered one month after ‘The Criminal’?

Probably, but nonetheless, that feeling is in there somewhere, helping Losey’s opus slog its way into viewers’ affections with a steely determination worthy of Baker himself. Though overlooked by critics upon release, ‘The Criminal’ now stands out as one of the strongest entries in the cycle of late 50s/early 60s British noirs within which its star proved such a defining presence, remaining sharp, brutal and disconcerting enough to make vicars, governors social workers choke on their arrowroot biscuits, however many decades down the line.

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(1) Hearteningly, Tommy Eyrtle, playing the calypso singer, went on to enjoy a prolific career in British film and TV, notably performing his own composition ‘Man Smart (Woman Smarter)’ in the 1965 ‘Dangerman’ episode ‘Man on the Beach’. Prince Monolulu - presumably playing the un named West Indian prisoner, although he is credited as “himself” on IMDB(?!) - had less luck however. Born in the Danish Virgin Islands in 1881, he died in London in 1965, his only credit subsequent to ‘The Criminal’ being an appearance on ‘The Ken Dodd Show’ the same year.

Losey at the BFI, Part # 1: Blind Date (1959) and Eva (1962)

All of Joseph Losey’s major concerns as a director can be seen, admittedly in pretty clumsy fashion, in the earliest of his British films I caught at the BFI, 1959’s Blind Date. A quick, low budget (I’m assuming) whodunit, ‘Blind Date’ gets off to an excellent start, as an aspiring Belgium artist played by Hardy Kruger hops off a London bus with a bunch of flowers, and proceeds to hop, skip and jump his way along the North bank of the Thames to the accompaniment of John Dankworth’s terrific, upbeat modern jazz score. (Mixing lively strings with bebop cool, it’s VERY Miles & Gil influenced sort of stuff – pretty damn fine.) Reaching what we assume to be his lady’s residence – an exquisitely, almost disgustingly, lavish art & antique-filled flat – Kruger finds the door on the latch and wonders in, making himself at home as he awaits her arrival. To his surprise, the police – led by tough Welsh detective Stanley Baker – arrive instead. A dead girl is discovered in the flat’s back bedroom, and poor Hardy is understandably subjected to some serious questioning. So far so good, but things really begin to flag as Kruger’s character begins to recount his affair with the wife of a prominent diplomat (Micheline Presle), instigating a a series of flashbacks, as the dastardly secrets culminating in the murder of a nightclub singer begin to unravel.

‘Blind Date’ is a very well made film, no question – Losey’s powerful eye for detail and claustrophobic use of interiors are in evidence throughout, and the difficult theme of class privilege and public school networks being utilised to whitewash aristocratic scandal is excellently and subtley handled, several years before the Profumo Affair would throw similar concerns directly into the public eye. The scene in which Baker’s working class detective is curtly informed by one of his softly spoken superiors that he’s “perfectly good at solving crimes”, but “fails to understand the wider ramifications of public service”, is chilling.



These points of interest aside though, the film is sunk by some major flaws. Primarily: the script is lousy. The relationship between Kruger and Presle, the pivot upon which the rest of the drama is supposed to balance, rings completely hollow, their scenes filled with passionless gestures of unconvincing passion and flatulent pseudo-bohemian dialogue of the “is this what art means to you??” variety. It’s also amusing to see that, in the grand tradition of films about artists, Kruger’s paintings are absolute crap, making his humourless pontificating about the struggle of the artist even more of a chore to sit through. And when the big plot reveal rolls around at the end, ‘Blind Date’ achieves a somewhat unique place in the annals of crime fiction by featuring a trick ending that manages to be both entirely predictable, and also to make almost no sense whatsoever.

Good performances might have saved the day, but, whilst Baker is characteristically solid, both Kruger and Presle ham it up horribly, never managing to convince us that their characters are anything other than thoroughly dislikable, ruining any sense of human tragedy that might have been extracted from the Double Indemnity-esque plotline.


‘Blind Date’ is not a terrible film by any means, but sadly these failures outweigh its obvious strengths. It could easily be argued that Losey put a lot of himself into the character of Kruger’s painter, portrayed as he is as a deadly serious, socially-conscious artist stumbling into the labyrinthine weirdness of the British class system, but nonetheless, as an early ‘60s British noir I found it decidedly inferior to Basil Dearden’s much-discussed but rarely-screened ‘Victim’ (1961), and I fear it is ultimately best viewed as a curio, or as an interesting precursor to the director’s later work.

(A far more interesting analysis of ‘Blind Date’ as it fits into Losey’s wider work can be read here at Sense of Cinema.)

Much the same mixture of strengths and failures can be seen, on a much grander scale, in one of the most ambitious and troubled films of Losey’s career, the French/Italian co-production Eva.


Whilst Losey may have maintained a low profile in the English speaking world, it seems that many in the European New Wave were hip to him from the word go. Apparently his name was being thrown around by the Cahiers du Cinéma critics even before he left America, and a still from the otherwise obscure initial release of ‘The Damned’ even made their cover. With a rep like that on the continent, I guess it was hardly surprising that Losey might have wanted to blow the comparatively stuffy British film industry for the more visionary realm of French and Italian cinema, and it was on that basis that he found himself shooting ‘Eva’ in Italy, with substantial backing from France’s influential Hakim brothers.

Befitting this change of scene, ‘Eva’ certainly marks a sea-change in the director’s approach. Gone are the tight narratives, tight framing and tight budget of his thrillers – ‘Eva’ immediately sets out its stall as a fuckin’ Work Of Art, with capital letters. A deliberate attempt to establish its creator as a cinematic maestro to be reckoned with, it is a sprawling, diaphanous, decadent mess of a movie that exists in any number of confusing variant prints, stretching between two and three hours in length. (The restored print the BFI are showing has been cobbled together Frankenstein style in an attempt to recreate the director’s original cut – as a result, some scenes are blighted by irremovable Norwegian subtitles, and image quality varies throughout.)


In purely visual and technical terms, the film is astonishing. Losey may have toyed with a distinctive palette of architecture, furnishings, artworks, shadows and reflections in the mise en scene of his previous films, but here, in the heart of European opulence and off the leash of commercial cinema, he just goes bonkers, filling every available space with rich, dramatic texture than almost overshadows the human drama. Rarely have Venice and Rome been rendered so exquisitely on film, and with Stanley Baker, Jeanne Morreau and the beautiful Virna Lisi mooning around them to another killer jazz soundtrack (this time by prolific French soundtrack composer Michel Legrand), it’s hard not to just sit back and let ‘Eva’s gorgeous aesthetics roll over you like a velvet tank. Stuffed to the gills with jagged juxtapositions and sledgehammer visual symbolism, it’s rare that five minutes goes go without me wanting to hit ‘pause’ and exclaim “now THAT’S a fucking shot!”

The elephant in the room though is of course, Fellini. To say that ‘Eva’ was very much working within the new blueprint for European film that Fellini had perfected with 1960’s incomparable ‘Le Dolce Vita’ would not be to take anything away from Losey and his collaborators. But with its labyrinthine party scenes, its gratuitous nightclub acts, and snatches of overheard conversation..? With its high-heels clattering across nocturnal cobbled streets, its glistening fountains, fast cars and strained attempts to be as Italian as it possibly can..? With its virile male protagonist staggering senselessly between alluring women and endless insane scenarios without pause for upwards of two hours…?

Let’s just say that, for much of its running time, ‘Eva’ approaches a homage to Fellini in much the same spirit that Ronnie Biggs might be dubbed ‘the great train-homager’. (Joke courtesy of Stephen Fry on ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue’ the other week).


Nonetheless, ‘Eva’ is blessed with more than it’s fair share of shattering pure-cinema moments and images liable to live on in one’s mind forever, and it could still have emerged from Federico’s shadow to become a powerful film in its own right. But, as with ‘Blind Date’, it’s the poor handling of narrative that eventually sinks the picture. Admittedly, ‘Eva’s more sprawling and amorphous nature doesn’t call for the same tight plotting as the earlier film, but still, every time the director tries to convince us that this is a serious and profound exploration of human feeling, its pulpy origins in James Hadley Chase’s source novel can’t help but shine through, veering into the realm of unintentional camp, as situations become increasingly fatuous and melodramatic, and characters’ motivations remain distinctly unbelievable.

The film left me with frankly no idea why Stanley Baker’s ambitious Welsh novelist (a walking cliché of the ‘shrewd-boyo-made-good’, for all of Baker’s attempts to invest him with more depth) would want to betray his clever and charming movie star fiancée (Lisi) for Moreau’s frankly shifty and less attractive (relatively speaking) courtesan, and vague intimations of potboiler-style ‘uncontrollable passions’ fail to fill the gap, leaving us with the impression that Baker’s character is simply some kind of mixed up fool, instantly sabotaging the empathy we’re supposed to share with him later as his carefully-crafted persona begins to collapse and his life disintegrates.


Enjoyable as the film may be if viewed out of context, or as a sumptuous relic of a now distant era, there is a faintly desperate feeling behind ‘Eva’ that is hard to ignore. Shot at the same time as Fellini was preparing to unleash ‘8 1/2’ on an unsuspecting world, during that brief window in which Italian culture, Italian fashion, Italian cars, French art cinema and American jazz were the last word in untouchable cool, it gives the impression of an Anglo-American director overreaching himself massively in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the continent’s tastemakers in the most garish and obvious way possible, abandoning in the process most of the elements that had initially attracted the French critics to his work.

By all accounts, Losey put his heart and soul into realizing ‘Eva’, and brooded for years over the way its near total failure in the face of producer-enforced cuts and botched distribution killed his attempt to establish himself as a European auteur. But, as the chap who introduced the BFI screening pointed out, Losey’s failure is our gain, as he returned to England tail between his legs and immediately proceeded to make what’s generally regarded as his masterpiece, and perhaps one of the greatest British films I’ve ever seen, 1963’s ‘The Servant’.