While serving a three-year sentence, Johnny Bannion (Stanley Baker) is already planning his biggest job upon his release: a 40,000 pound score at a racetrack. The robbery goes off without a hitch, but Johnny's traitorous former flame, Maggie (Jill Bennett), alerts the police who send him back to the big house. The rest of his gang uses every means at their disposal to find out where Johnny hid the loot, resorting to using other prisoners and a staged riot to drive this uncooperative prisoner to giving away the secret location.
While the heist aspects of the story will be overly familiar to many viewers (especially as racetrack jobs were already perfected in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, 1956), The Criminal justifies itself with its surprisingly naturalistic prison scenes and a sturdy central performance by Baker. The film originated as a Hammer Films production with a screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, who wrote most of their significant horror classics over the next decade. Losey (who actually would go on to work for Hammer with the marvelous These Are the Damned, 1963) found the screenplay inadequate and commissioned another writer, relative newcomer Alun Owen, to give the script a more focused, British emphasis. As Losey recalled, "most of his gift was for catching the sound of particular dialects and a certain common lingo." Through Baker, Losey also recruited several released criminals to share stories about their experience and toured numerous British facilities which influenced everything from the dialogue to the construction of the prison set, which was based on the interior of an old Victorian jail. One of the main inspirations during Losey's research was "Dimes," a formidable career criminal prone to flashy, expensive cars and clothes who earned a fearsome reputation after a bloody ten-minute knife fight in the middle of London with a rival crime lord. Owen's interpolation of these real-life criminal elements proved more than satisfactory, and not surprisingly, he went on to a successful writing career including the Oscar®-nominated screenplay for A Hard Day's Night (1964) and a host of dramatic television work.
A die-hard socialist whose political activism sometimes affected the box office of his films, Baker was an unlikely movie star in 1950s Britain who actively campaigned to get Losey to direct The Criminal. They worked together again on several occasions, though Baker is now best remembered for such roles as Zulu (1964) and The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah (1962, aka Sodom and Gomorrah); he narrowly avoided even greater fame when he turned down the role of James Bond in Dr. No (1962). Despite numerous offers from Hollywood, he remained primarily committed to British cinema throughout his career until his death in 1976.
The rest of the cast of The Criminal is rounded out with several familiar character actors, with Sam Wanamaker maximizing his duplicitous secondary role as Baker's partner in crime. Though he went on to numerous other acting roles in films like Death on the Nile (1978) and Private Benjamin (1980), he spent as much time behind the camera directing many TV programs as well as occasional feature films like Catlow (1971) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). The fascinating Jill Bennett remained confined to supporting roles for much of her career but made a strong impression in projects ranging from Hammer's The Nanny (1965) to a stern skating coach in the 1981 James Bond film, For Your Eyes Only. Significantly, three interesting actors all made their big screen debuts here: the fascinating and often weaselly Murray Melvin, long before he became one of Ken Russell's most reliable actors (1971's The Devils and The Boy Friend among many others); busy horror and action actor Patrick Wymark, who went on to Witchfinder General, Where Eagles Dare (both 1968), and Blood on Satan's Claw (1971); and as the memorably nasty prison warden Barrows, the colorful Irish-born Patrick Magee delivered the first of many memorably sinister roles including Losey's The Servant, Dementia 13 (both 1963), Marat/Sade (1967), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Tales from the Crypt (1972). As the finished script lacked the exploitable violence Hammer required, the production moved to Anglo-Amalgamated. Though the soundstage at Merton Park Studios proved inadequate to accommodate the full original design, the clever use of mirrors allowed the cameraman, Robert Krasker, to create the illusion of a cavernous, fully-formed detention center. The end result, Losey felt, "tried to show the life in prison as it really was: where the guards were bribed and where there were ruling gangs in opposition to each other -- a kind of gangsterism in prison where there was a code which you could not, under penalty of death, violate; where there was a kind of violence of unbelievable brutality but mixed with humour and a certain kind of compassion." The racetrack heist was filmed at Hurst Park, where a real race was being conducted during shooting. Resourcefully, Losey captures perhaps the film's standout shot -- a long single take of Baker darting through the crowd -- in a single take.
In Losey's filmography, The Criminal is extremely significant as his first collaboration with jazz composer John Dankworth, who went on to score most of the director's famous subsequent works in the '60s including Accident [1967], Modesty Blaise [1966], and The Servant. Dankworth's wife, vocalist Cleo Laine, also sings the memorable main theme, "Thieving Boy." Ironically, Dankworth had just come off scoring Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), which opened in the U.K. the same week as The Criminal and swiftly overshadowed it at the box office. However, as audiences in Britain soon learned, the new breed of directors churned out so many important films each month that there soon proved room enough for everyone throughout the remainder of the decade.
Producers: Jack Greenwood
Director: Joseph Losey
Screenplay: Alun Owen (screenplay); Jimmy Sangster (uncredited)
Cinematography: Robert Krasker br> Art Direction: Scott MacGregor
Music: Johnny Dankworth
Film Editing: Reginald Mills; Geoffrey Muller (uncredited)
Cast: Stanley Baker (Johnny Bannion), Sam Wanamaker (Mike Carter), Grégoire Aslan (Frank Saffron), Margit Saad (Suzanne), Jill Bennett (Maggie), Rupert Davies (Edwards), Laurence Naismith (Mr. Town), John Van Eyssen (Formby), Noel Willman (Prison Governor), Derek Francis (Priest).
BW-97m.
by Nathaniel Thompson
Sources:
Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)
Conversations with Losey, Michel Ciment (Australasia Law Book Co, 1985)
Joseph Losey, Edith De Rham (Trafalgar Square, 1991)
Joseph Losey: A Revenge on Life, David Caute (Faber &F aber, 1996)
