British Crime Cinema by Chibnall Steve; Murphy Robert;

Author:Chibnall, Steve; Murphy, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

But the film’s protagonist, Chief Inspector Johnnoe (Nigel Patrick) is unconvinced that the tried-and-tested informant system can be replaced by detective science. ‘You can’t catch the bad boys with a lot of transistorised Mechano sets’, he complains, voicing the fears of the film’s technical consultant, ex-Detective Superintendent John Gosling. The Informers may have doubts about the new methods, but it is far from sentimental in its depiction of the police and their relationships with criminals. In this it takes its lead from Hell is a City and its idea of the crook as a dark reflection of the detective.5 As with Offbeat, Annakin takes further this questioning of the moral superiority, if not of the law, then at least of its enforcers. ‘I used to think a snout was the lowest kind of vermin’, Johnnoe’s reluctant informant complains, ‘but now I know there is one thing lower, and that’s the copper that keeps him at it’. Nor does the film shirk from implying, like the otherwise avuncular Gideon’s Day (John Ford, 1958) before it, that some policemen can be bought. ‘You know what I’d really like?’ the oily villain Bertie Hoyle (Derren Nesbitt) asks Johnnoe, ‘I’d like a policeman, you know, one that I could call my very own.’ Johnnoe rejects the suggestion, but we are left in little doubt that other detectives might have fewer scruples.

Interviewed during the film’s extensive location shooting, producer William MacQuitty had promised sharp realism ‘in the new wave style’ (Kine Weekly 27 December 1962) and veracity is evident not only in the police characters, but also in the way the underworld is represented. Annakin and MacQuitty had deliberately cast little-known actors who could play workingclass parts convincingly and seem at home in a multi-ethnic criminal milieu and, if Frank Finlay as Hoyle’s manipulative partner Leon Sale is now hard to accept, he still offers a dramatic contrast to Nigel Patrick’s patrician policeman. Underworld vernacular—‘drum’, ‘bogey’, ‘manor’, ‘stir’, ‘ponce’ —is now familiar from hundreds of episodes of Minder and The Sweeney, but provided a fresh authenticity in 1963. Nesbitt’s cocky and unstable Hoyle is another in the line of socially aspiring spivs that included Peter Seller’s Meadows, but there is an emphasis on his nouveau riche lifestyle that recalls Stanley Baker’s Bannion. Two years on, however, Hoyle’s tastes are less Americanised than Bannion’s, and reflect, instead, that developing rapprochement between London’s gangster fraternity and the well-heeled thrill seekers of the ‘Chelsea Set’, which Colin McCabe (1998) has identified as so important to the underground-meets-the-underworld masterpiece, Performance (Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970).

In contrast to the style-blind ex-cons of a contemporary film like Calculated Risk (Norman Harrison, 1963) Hoyle apes the English gentleman with chauffeured Bentley, bowler, Crombie and silk dressing gown but his shrewder partner, Leon, is the more interesting figure. As a commando turned crook, he links to a tradition of seeing criminality as an adaptation to demobilisation, but he also looks towards a new era of professionalism that will transform both crime and policing.

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