Brighton Rock (1947)

In adapting his novel for the screen, author Graham Greene (and co-scripter Terence Rattigan) skillfully retain the story's fascination with religion, a rare subtext for film noir. Baby-faced killer Pinkie Brown (Richard Attenborough) is a Catholic, clearly no longer practicing but still fascinated with the Church's ideas of sin and redemption, and his romance with the young waitress Rose (Carol Marsh), also a Catholic, brings those notions into focus. Rose and Ida (Hermione Baddeley), a barfly turned amateur gumshoe (amazingly, she manages to stay out of Pinkie's murderous grasp) are a fascinating pair. At 17, Rose is a fatalist, a waitress who falls in love with a customer on her first day of work and agrees to marry him even suspecting that he's a killer. Ida, a middle-aged woman whose looks have long gone to seed, isn't starry-eyed about men, though she is determined to see justice done against Pinkie and save Rose from death at the hands of this ruthless gangster. This is as tough a noir as any produced at the same time in Hollywood. At one point Rose pleads to Dallow (William Hartnell), one of Pinkie's henchmen, "You're his friend. I wish I was," to which the dapper crook casually replies, "You're his wife." Attenborough, better known to contemporary filmgoers as the director of epic screen biographies such as Gandhi and Chaplin, is brilliantly creepy as the young punk, a kind of British James Cagney with his own brand of swagger. And, it should be noted, the film contains a wonderfully wicked coda, a twist neatly set up and brilliantly executed. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide