Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old tough-guy Pinkie Brown is killing time, waiting for the members of his gang to show up and tell him that their job is done. Hale begs her to stay with him, but Ida, confusing his desperation for ardor, promises to be right back. The two share a cab ride and a kiss, after which Ida insists on ducking into a ladies’ restroom for a wash. At a bar, he runs into the curvy and flirtatious Ida Arnold. His only hope for survival lies in securing company for the day. Hale, in Brighton as part of his newspaper’s “Kolley Kibber man” promotion, knows that Pinkie and his gang are after him for a story he wrote about Kite, the gang’s now deceased former leader. The violence also seems ratcheted up, though it's generally faithful to the book.Brighton Rock by Graham Greene begins with the news reporter Charles Hale drinking alone in Brighton on a tourist-choked holiday weekend. It's an odd choice, but it functions well enough aesthetically - skinny suits, kids on scooters - and it releases this 'Brighton Rock' from too many comparisons with its monochromatic forebear. Joffe bumps the setting up to the early 1960s, a period of youth riots in Britain and the onset, more generally, of the mods. But it captures the chilling essence of Greene's masterful novel (an 'entertainment,' he called it) with a boldness that never shies from the evil of Pinkie or the innocence of Rose (Andrea Riseborough), a witness in the death of a rival gangster. There's bombast that should have been toned down, sentiment that might have been excised.

The film itself - directed and adapted by Rowan Joffe - has its flaws.

His Pinkie is a slim, mesmerizing package of immaculate and undiluted evil, clear as a stick of Brighton Rock candy. Richard Attenborough nailed that purity 64 years ago, and Sam Riley nails it now. He is a hateful slip of a man.īut strange as it sounds, he's pure - true to himself to the last. Its antihero, Pinkie Brown, is a malevolent young thug grasping at power in the gangland underworld of Brighton, a pretty seaside resort town in the south of England. Greene's worldview is in the forefront in 'Brighton Rock,' the first cinematic go at the novel since John Boulting's classic of 1947. Good and evil attract each other the next world looms, like a promise or a threat, on the other side of death. In the foggy Catholic noir of the novelist Graham Greene, dark and light are opposite sides of the same mystical forces.

Starring Sam Riley and Andrea Riseborough.

Brighton rock book review