Category: Crime drama

Goodfellas (1990)

Pesci, Liotta and De Niro embrace the life of crime in Scorsese’s masterpiece Goodfellas

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Ray Liotta (Henry Hill), Robert DeNiro (Jimmy Conway), Joe Pesci (Tommy DeVito), Lorraine Bracco (Karen Hill), Paul Sorvino (Paulie Cicero), Frank Sivero (Frankie Carbone), Frank Vincent (Billy Batts), Tony Darrow (Sonny Bunz), Mike Starr (Frenchy), Chuck Low (Morrie Kessler), Frank DiLeo (Tuddy Cicero), Samuel L. Jackson (“Stacks” Edwards), Catherine Scorsese (Tommy’s mother), Michael Imperioli (Spider), Debi Mazar (Sandy)

If there is one film loved more than any other in Martin Scorsese’s filmography, it’s probably Goodfellas. It’s a seismic high-point, not just in its genre – the greatest gangster film ever made since The Godfather Part II – but in film-making, it’s influence and legacy seeming to hung over everything ever since, not least the next-great gangster epic The Sopranos (with which it shares a whopping 27 actors, most notably Lorraine Bracco, Michael Imperoli, Frank Vincent and Tony Sirico). But, on top of all that, Goodfellas works so well because it is a masterpiece of both style and substance, a superbly inventive film that uses all the tricks of cinema to tell a fascinating and brilliantly paced morality tale.

“As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster”. So says Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), our Irish-Italian guide (and those heritage distinctions are very important in this world) who joins the wrong crowd as a teenager in the 1960s and winds up a strung-out, cocaine-addicted wreck in the 1980s caught by the cops and turned for states evidence, fleeing to an obscure life in witness protection with his long-suffering wife and sometime-accomplice Karen (Lorraine Bracco). Along the way though, Hill loves the glamour and greed of the gangster life, it’s excitements and boys-club rules, guided by his mentor the terrifyingly ruthless Irish-Italian Jimmy “the Gent” Conway (Robert DeNiro), psychopathic fellow gangster Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and menacingly quiet capo Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino – never better). 

Scorsese’s film is an electric celebration of movie making, partly why it’s so beloved of film buffs. Scorsese marshals all the weapons in his considerable arsenal as filmmaker. We get jump cuts. We get freeze frames (each marking a significant moment in Hill’s life). We get sharp editing. We get unreliable narration. We get dizzyingly brilliant long-shots and tracking shots (none more so famous than Henry and Karen’s arriving at a club – from travelling from the back door, through the kitchen and into the best table at the club all in one wonderful shot). We get Scorsese’s brilliant use of music, his perfectly placed camera, his brilliance in knowing when to hold his shots, his mastery of lighting (an early hit is so bathed in red it feels like digging a grave in hell). This film was the master at his ultimate height, inspired by everything from the New Wave to old-school 1930s gangster films.

He was also perfect for the material, as no one perhaps understood this world better than Scorsese: and that’s the seductive good and the terrifying bad. Back to that shot of Karen and Henry arriving at the club. The whole sequence – the deference with which Henry is treated, his cool comfort with power, the exclusiveness and special treatment of the whole thing – that smacks of the sort of ultimate party we can only dream of. For most of the first half of the film, Scorsese totally understands why this life is so appealing and exciting. Sure there is violence. There’s danger. But there’s also comradeship. There’s doing anything you want all the time (so long as you stick within the clubs rules). There’s being treated by a God by those around you. Who wouldn’t enjoy that? Is there any wonder Henry saw this as he was growing up and, more than anything, wanted a part of it? In voice-over Karen makes it clear, all this violence and power and being asked to hide guns by your boyfriend is sexy. Who cares about the implications, give me a slice of that pie.

Without understanding this glamour, the film could never show the dark depths of the underbelly of gangsterism. Strangely, perhaps because this is a blue-collar film (the highest gangster we see, Paulie, is still only a few steps away from the street), it’s easier for viewers to give these guys a pass for their behaviour (in a way no one did with Scorsese’s spiritual sequel, his white-collar crime movie The Wolf of Wall Street). Don’t be fooled. Scorsese hints at it with the opening prologue, with Henry, Jimmy and Tommy pulling over a car to brutally finish off (with a spade, knife and gun) a body of a yet-to-be-revealed victim in the back of a car. These ain’t good guys, and for all Henry is shocked by the capacity of violence from the other two he does nothing to stop it.

Because violence is what powers this film, it can happen anytime, it can happen to anyone and your killers always come to you smiling as friends. The gangster code preaches all the time about never betraying your friends, never ratting. But these guys stab each other in the back all the time. There is no honour among thieves. Every hit comes seconds after friendly enquiries and laughs. When Jimmy masterminds a brilliant heist, so paranoid and distrusting is he of those he did the crime with that he has them all killed (a masterful cut montage). Later in the film, strung out on cocaine and terrified of the law Henry treats every meeting like it’s the entrée to him being killed. Even Karen isn’t safe – witness the brilliantly oblique scene late in the film when Jimmy offers her some coats ‘they’re just round the corner’ – is it a hit? Are the coats real? Who knows…

Loyalty is only extended at best to one or two figures. Jimmy (Robert DeNiro in imperious form, terrifyingly cold and also generously ceding the best moments to his co-stars) seems to have a never-ending patience for the psychopathic, instinctive violence of his best friend Tommy. Played with a petrifying Oscar-winning flourish by Joe Pesci, Tommy is like a murderous Rumpelstiltskin, a brutal killer and wired murderer who can explode at any moment. Witness the famous “Funny how?” scene – it plays superbly off Tommy’s unpredictability, his hair-trigger possibility to either laugh with you or shoot you. Much of the film’s problems for our ‘heroes’ – not less that body in the boot of the car – stems from Tommy’s capacity for thoughtless violence. 

Scorsese directs these scenes with such unbearable tension, that any romance of the early sequences of the young Henry Hill disappears. How could you even begin to imagine spending time in a room with these violent, soulless men who kill each other at the drop of a hat? Despite all this, never for one moment until the very end does Henry even consider leaving this world behind. Like so many of the characters in The Sopranos the addiction of this world of power is just way, way too much and if that means a short life then, hell, so be it. Even at the end on witness protection, Henry’s punishment is that he is forced to live a normal life like a no-body (or rather like the rest of us) while balancing the guilt of betraying the people he left behind. Loyalty is a complex thing, but always one-sided in the Gangster world.

As Hill Ray Liotta gives the finest performance of his career. Henry is part wide-eyed naïve dreamer unaware that his dream is a nightmare, and loving every minute of it. Liotta’s Hill is an addict to everything he touches – danger, violence, infidelity and most damagingly of all the mountains of cocaine he is consuming by the 1980s. Compared to the other gangsters, he’s a decent guy – but only in the sense he hesitates (slightly) in the face of murder. He’s selfish, greedy, strangely likeable oddly sympathetic but you feel he gets everything he deserves. Just as good is Lorraine Bracco as his wife Karen, too aroused and infatuated with the bonuses the crime life brings her to listen to her conscience. 

Scorsese’s film is a masterpiece that completely understands that the gangster life is, at the end of the day, a series of boys who never grew up who espouse concepts like duty, honour and faith but live lives of greed, petty murder, vengeance and savagery. Sure walking on the dark side can be fun, can be exciting and can bring you some immediate bonuses. But it also leaves your soul as cold as Jimmy’s or as blackly non-existent as Tommy, the sort of guy who can pour affection on his mother while shrugging off her worries about what that terrible smell is in the boot of his car. These guys are having fun for half the film, until they aren’t, but don’t get seduced by the fun of it. Scorsese knows only too well that they’re going where the film started: a red light washed grave in the middle of nowhere.

The Big Heat (1953)

Lee Marvin, Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford feel The Big Heat coming on

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Glenn Ford (Det Sgt Dave Bannion), Gloria Grahame (Debby Marsh), Lee Marvin (Vince Stone), Jeanette Nolan (Bertha Duncan), Alexander Scourby (Mike Lagana), Jocelyn Brando (Katie Bannion), Adam Williams (Larry Gordon), Kathyn Eames (Marge), Willis Bouchey (Lt Ted Wilks)

Films like Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat were generally seen at the time as easy-to-overlook pulp thrillers. Today however, they are seen as classics and few look as ahead of their time as The Big Heat, a skilfully constructed, almost nihilistic, revenge thriller that turns its view of America into that of a land big, grim and full of corruption.

Detective Sergeant Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) is called in when a senior policeman is found to have committed suicide. All is not what it seems though: the wife Bertha (Jeanette Duncan) doesn’t seem as sad as she should, there are conflicting reports that the death might be suicide and the dead man’s possible lover is found brutally killed shortly after Bannion talks to her. Bannion is a stubborn, bull-in-a-China-shop type, so he quickly assumes smooth local gangster Mike Lagana (Alexander Scourby) is connected up in all this, not least after his wife Katie (Jocelyn Brando) receives a threatening phone call. But Bannion’s methods lead to tragedy, and he soon finds himself going rogue to find justice, with the eventual help of Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame), gangster’s moll of brutal sadist and Langana lieutenant Vince Stone (Lee Marvin).

Lang’s film is a strikingly un-rose tinted view of America. The very first shot of the movie is a gun, and violence is endemic in this corrupt world, where justice is for sale. We barely see a character who doesn’t have some whiff of corruption. Bannion finds cops doing guard duty outside Lagana’s home while he throws a party and half the higher-ups in the department are either in the pocket of the gangsters, or determined to do as little as possible to rock the boat. The lives of the families of those causing trouble for this system don’t account for much either, with any unpalatable truths brushed firmly under the carpet.

Thown into the middle of this is Glenn Ford’s Detective Bannion. At first glance Bannion looks like exactly the hero we would want – a straight-down-the-line type who says what he thinks, and determined to let nothing stand in the way of, or water down, his investigation. Better known for comedies, Glenn Ford is very good as this bullish man, who very clearly thinks of himself as “the only good cop in town”, and whose determination to stop at nothing very soon tips over into recklessness. Because reckless is what he is: Bannion is fixated on revenge after a tragic attack on his family, and he has no compunction – or even it seems moral awareness – that this path causes danger and consequences for other people around him.

Bannion’s situation is largely self-inflicted – is it sensible going straight to the house of a leading local gangster and threatening and humiliating him? – and Bannion turns out to be largely a destructive force for those who meet him. Most affected are the four female characters he interacts with in the film. A mixture of innocent, corrupt, in denial and cruel, all four of these women find themselves thrown into often mortal danger, with Bannion barely stopping to consider the risks to them. Bannion, it becomes clear, is the ultimate ends-justify-the-means kind of guy, willing to accept collateral damage of almost any kind if it means he can take down the bad guys who have done him wrong. It makes for an intriguing anti-hero at the film’s centre, with Bannion increasingly resembling a sort of proto-type Dirty Harry, the hard-boiled cop who’ll do things his way and damn the consequences.

Mind you, it doesn’t mean he isn’t right about the corruption in this damn dirty town. Preening gangster Mike Lagana (played with a wispy arrogance by Alexander Scourby) has everyone in his pocket, and couldn’t give tuppence for any small fry causing him problems. First introduced lazily in bed setting in chain events that will cover up the reason for the suicide of a leading policeman, he has fingers in every pie. He’s also – the film economically suggests – sexually indiscriminate and a bit of a mummy’s boy to boot, sure signs of cadism in any 1950s detective story. His decadent home and personal cowardice (for all his speed in ordering deaths) make his corruption probably even more galling for straight-shooter Bannion.

In fact, I’m not sure Bannion can even accept Lagana as a “worthy foe” and he increasingly zeroes in on Lagana’s number two, the brutish Vince Stone as the man he intends to take down. Played with a star-making swagger by Lee Marvin, Stone is a force of nature, an act-first-think-next-week kind of guy, who terrorises people around him and will resort to anything from fists to pots of boiling coffee to exact obedience. Marvin scowls and prowls his way through the film like a caged bear, constantly on the verge of violence. It’s a brilliant performance.

It also makes clear why he’s pushed Debby – played with a wonderful fragility behind all her femme fatale looks by Gloria Grahame – so far under his thumb. As she says, why intercede against anything he does when she could be next to take a beating. Grahame is excellent as a woman who has suppressed her conscience about what is going on around her, and learned to use her sexuality as a tool for getting what she wants. Watching her slowly begin to come to life as a moral force provides one of the film’s finest stories – her desire to do the right thing and get revenge, a firm contrast with Bannion’s more hardline goals.

All of this is packaged neatly and without fuss by Lang into a superb indictment of America. Every official is at least shady, if not outright bent. Every scene bubbles with the possibility of violence and danger. The innocent are swiftly trampled and the heroes need to bring themselves down to the same brutal, intimidating rough and tumble as the villains to have any chance of cracking the crime. Bodies pile up, lives are ruined, but at the end you still wonder if any of it will have any lasting impact. For Lang it feels like America is a constant spiral of danger and corruption that begins and end with a gun. Either way The Big Heat is a true classic.

Legend (2011)

Tom Hardy plays with himself in Legend

Director: Brian Helgeland

Cast: Tom Hardy (Ronnie Kray/Reggie Kray), Emily Browning (Frances Shea), Christopher Eccleston (Superintendent Leonard “Nipper” Read), David Thewlis (Leslie Payne), Taron Egerton (Edward “Mad Teddy” Smith), Chazz Palminteri (Angelo Bruno), Paul Bettany (Charlie Richardson), Colin Morgan (Frankie Shea), Tara Fitzgerald (Mrs Shea), Paul Anderson (Albert Donoghue), Sam Spruell (Jack McVitie), John Sessions (Lord Boothby), Kevin McNally (Harold Wilson)

Tom Hardy is the sort of actor who, if you could find a role for him in your film, you certainly would. So how about getting the chance to cast him twice? That’s the happy situation Brian Helgeland was in here, with the chance for Hardy to play not one but both of the Kray twins. The buzz around Hardy taking on both roles was so strong that the film itself was almost completely forgotten in the crush. This was perhaps easy to do since the film is pretty mediocre at best, a confused mess that can’t decide if it wants to wallow in the undeserved glamour of the Krays or whether it wants to explore the darker currents below the surface.

The film covers most of the career of the Kray brothers – the seemingly more grounded, ambitious Reggie and then the more impulsive Ronnie, recently released from psychiatric prison. The Kray brothers balance competing demands: Ronnie is essentially happy where he is, king of a small pond, while Reggie has dreams of expanding a criminal empire across the Atlantic in partnership with the Mafia. Meanwhile, various gangland opponents and the police stalk the brothers, while Reggie’s relationship and later marriage to Frances Shea (Emily Browning) slowly collapses.

Helgeland’s film is a fairly bland piece of film-making that wants to have its cake and eat it. It wants to enjoy the criminal undertakings of the Krays, their clubland cool, charisma and charm. But it also wants to make clear that these are violent criminals who have very few moral qualms about anything they do. It’s a printing and an exploration of the legend, but the problem is that it never actually becomes particularly interesting, despite the best efforts of everyone involved. Perhaps everyone became too blinded by the pyrotechnics and undoubted skill of Hardy’s double performance that the overall film itself got a bit lost.

Hardy is superb, turning the brothers into two highly distinctive personalities who both seem like two halves of the same shattered personality, whose character traits slowly merge and even swap over the course of the film. Hardy also develops a key physicality and style for both characters that is very similar but also clearly different in both cases. So you get Ronnie, Churchill-bulldog like, with a muscular, growling heaviness that stinks of paranoia. And Reggie, smart-suited and slicked back, with a confident thrusting demeanour that falls apart over the film into a weasily fury.

Both these progressions make perfect sense, and Hardy is so skilled at playing both halves of many conversations that you forget while watching the film that you are looking at one actor playing two roles. Astonishingly – and perhaps the biggest trick he pulls – he turns this tour-de-force double role into something that feels so natural you don’t notice it happening. And the bond that ties the two brothers together into a descent into hell is so strong that even when beating the crap out of each other they still seem like two halves of one messed up personality.

Hardy is of course so brilliant, the rest of the skilled cast basically only get a few beats to sketch out various gangland figures and coppers. Excellent actors – Eccleston, Thewlis, Bettany, Anderson – are picked out to do this, but none make much of an impression. The thrust is always the strange dance of personality between the Krays, two brothers who effectively destroy each other with their actions, but are so closely bound together that the one cannot survive without the other.

It’s psychology like this that you wish the film could explore, especially as Hardy takes both brothers to dark and bitter places that makes both of them openly vile and terrifying to imagine meeting. Helgeland chooses to explore much of this – particularly Reggie’s darkness – through a rather tired voiceover led structure via Emily Browning’s Frances Shea. There is nothing wrong with Browning’s performance, but the predictable and rather traditional structure that this gives the story – not to mention the rather clumsy scripting – ends up dragging the film along.

Helgeland makes a decent job of directing this film, and it looks fine, but it is strangely underpowered and unengaging at every turn, a bland piece of gangland history that only really catches fire when both Hardys take the stage and this superstar actor lets rip. Away from him, there is a soft-focus nostalgia in its look back at the sixties, which confuses the attitude the film has towards the Krays, and a ticking off of historical events that gets in the way of creating a compelling narrative.

Hardy overshadows the film and he deserves to as he is more or less the only reason to watch it.

John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum (2019)

Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry and some very, very mean dogs in John Wick Chapter 3

Director: Chad Stahelski

Cast: Keanu Reeves (John Wick), Ian McShane (Winston), Mark Dacascos (Zero), Laurence Fishbourne (The Bowery King), Asia Kate Dillon (The Adjucator), Halle Berry (Sofia), Lance Reddick (Charon), Anjelica Huston (The Director), Saïd Taghmaoui (The Elder), Jerome Flynn (Berrada)

Early on in the film, John Wick (Keanu Reeves in a role he might have been born to play) builds a gun from scratch components of other weapons to fire some outsized ammunition, throws an axe across a room to take out an assassin, and then effectively reloads a horse, using its rear leg kicks to dispatch two more luckless assassins. It’s a dizzying 20 minutes or so of pure balls-to-the-wall action fun full of invention and black humour. The film never gets near repeating it, despite much trying.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum doesn’t have much in the way of plot. Instead it’s effectively a two-hour series of fight sequences. What plot there is pops up around the edges of all this imaginative blood-letting. That plot doesn’t really make much sense, and can basically be summarised as John has been declared excommunicado by “The High Table”, the shady organisation that runs the criminal underworld, meaning he is a target for every assassin in the world, and he is trying to reverse that decision. That’s kind of it, and any other subplots are basically slightly confusing or narratively empty detours from that central idea.

If you cut out all the fight sequences from the film, it wouldn’t run a lot longer than 15 minutes. There isn’t really any interest in the talking stuff or the characters, which seems to be fine for the likes of Laurence Fishbourne, who is wheeled out for three scenes of badass scenery chewing, but does mean that motivations and reasons for why anyone is doing anything at all remain completely unclear. There is a key subplot involving Ian McShane’s management of the Continental, the criminal “neutral zone” hotel in the centre of New York, that involves so many changes of allegiance and intentions that it winds up making no real sense.

But then people ain’t going to this for a character study. They are there for the fights. And, as I say, these are really inventive and entertaining. The first 20 minutes – with John haring through New York, trying to stay one step ahead of a blizzard of killers – is brilliant. It’s designed to be watched with large groups of people in the same mood, encouraging you to laugh, wince and shout out with the people around you. You can’t fault the work that has gone into the filming of this or the commitment of the actors or the genius of the choreographers. All of this is pretty faultless. And, no matter what extended fight you watch, you know you will see something different in every single one.

The problem is, the vast number of fights begins to pummel the audience into submission as well. Seeing Keanu Reeves involved in a series of three-in-a-row mixed martial arts sequences, each lasting well over 5-10 minutes, you start to let the whole thing drift over you. Put bluntly, after the initial explosion of action, the film hits a level it tries to sustain for almost an hour. And it’s too much. You just can’t keep that same level of engagement. I actually nearly dropped off at one point, which is not a good sign. How much action can one film take? 

There needs to be a balance. And without any real investment in what we are seeing, John Wick 3 is another of those films designed for YouTube. I can imagine watching most of these fights as little five-minute videos on the Internet in the future. Actually broken down like this I will probably enjoy it a lot more. But as a single film, there is nothing there to link it together.

The first film had a simple, but very pure, storyline that we could all relate to. A man loses his beloved wife, who on her deathbed gifts him a dog to care for. Said dog is then killed in a senseless break-in by some arrogant criminals. John Wick’s revenge is against those who thoughtlessly took from him the last piece of the only woman he loved. Everyone can relate to that – and it grounded everything we saw and immediately put us on John’s side. This film however is a confused motivation-less mess. If the series originally presented us with a John unwillingly dragged back into this world, since then (and here) he seems like a character with no inner life. 

The film attempts vaguely to add one, suggesting that John must make a choice between being a killer or the better man. Problem is choosing to be the better man isn’t really a platform for fights. So we lose what the film really needs, which is John struggling between his good and bad demons. Instead his motivations are a confused mess and the film spends more time showing us the brutal groin attacks of Halle Berry’s dogs (those things fight with no honour let me tell you) than giving us a lead character with a coherent personality.

It makes John Wick 3 not a lot more than a YouTube compilation, and giving Ian McShane some Latin to drop to explain the film’s title, or trying to change a character in Act 4 into a personal rival for John, doesn’t suddenly give it depth or interest. It’s fun in small chunks, but this is way too long and seems to have lost at least half of what made the first film such a guilty pleasure.

King of Thieves (2018)

Michael Caine leads the Old Lags on one last hurrah in the misjudged King of Thieves

Director: James Marsh

Cast: Michael Caine (Brian Reader), Jim Broadbent (Terry Perkins), Tom Courtenay (John Kenny Collins), Charlie Cox (Basil/Michael Seed), Paul Whitehouse (Carl Wood), Michael Gambon (Billy “The Fish” Lincoln), Ray Winstone (Danny Jones), Francesca Annis (Lynne Reader)

In 2015, a group of old lags robbed a safety deposit company in Hatton Garden. Over the Easter weekend, the gang broke while the facility was empty, drilled through a wall, climbed into the safe and cleared out almost £14 million in cash, diamonds and other goods. The crime captured the public imagination largely because the robbers, bar one member of the gang, were all over 60. This country has a certain nostalgia for rogues, and a tendency towards a condescending affection for the aged. In real life, the only thing remotely charming about these hardened criminals, many of them with extremely violent backgrounds, was their age.

James Marsh pulls together a great cast of actors for his heist caper. Brian Reader, the brains behind the operation, is played with gravitas by Michael Caine. Terry Perkins, the man who cuts Reader out of the profits, is played by Jim Broadbent. Tom Courtenay, Ray Winstone, Paul Whitehouse and Michael Gambon play the rest of the lags while Charlie Cox is the young tech expert who brings the possibility of the heist to Reader’s attention. With a cast like this, it’s a shame the overall film is a complete mess from start to finish.

I watched this film after first watching ITV’s forensically detailed four-part series, Hatton Garden, covering the heist in full detail. That drama was far from perfect, but it was vastly superior to this. The main strength of Hatton Garden was that it never, ever lost sight of the fact that this was not a victimless crime. Real-life small businesses went bust due to property lost in the heist. Families lost priceless, irreplaceable heirlooms. Items of hugely sentimental value have never been recovered. Lives were damaged. On top of that, Hatton Garden stresses the grimy lack of glamour to these thieves, their greed, their paranoia, their aggression and their capacity for violence. Far from charming rogues, they are selfish, greedy old men who fall over themselves to betray each other and are clueless about the powers and abilities of the modern police force.

King of Thieves occasionally tries to remind people that these were hardened career criminals. But it also wants us to have a great time watching actors we love carry out a heist against the odds, like some sort of Ocean’s OAPs. James Marsh never manages to make a consistent decision on the angle he is taking on these men or the crime they carried out. It’s half a comedy, half a drama and the tone and attitude towards the burglars yo-yos violently from scene to scene. The end result, basically, is to let them off with a slap on the wrist.

“It’s patronising” rages Reader at one point at the media coverage of the crime, annoyed at how it stresses their age as if that somehow makes it a jolly jaunt. Never mind that the film does the same. The score contributes atrociously to this, a series of jazzy, caperish tunes that echo the 60s heydays of these violent men (Reader and Perkins had both stood trial for murders, and were lucky to get off) punctured with some cheesily predictable songs. Tom Jones plays as our heroes comes together, and Shirley Bassey warbles The Party’s Over as things fall apart. The old men banter and bicker about the confusions of the modern world like a series of talking heads from Grumpy Old Men and the general mood is one of light comedy.

The film does try and darken the tone in the second half, post-robbery, as things start to fall apart and tensions erupt in the gang. Here we get a little bit of the mettle of the actors involved in this. Jim Broadbent, in particular, goes way against type as Perkins’ capacity of violence (even at a diabetes-wracked 67) starts to emerge. Tom Courtenay’s Kenny Collins emerges as manipulative liar, playing off the robbers against each other. Ray Winstone sprays foul language around with a pitbull aggression. Even Michael Caine roars a few death threats, furious at being betrayed by the gang.

But it never really takes, because the film never throws in any sense of the victims of this crime. Blood is never drawn in this slightly darker sequence of the film. Even the clashes between the gang are played at times for light relief. Anything outside the gang is ignored. The victims? Who cares. The cops? There is barely a policeman in this film who has a line.

The film undermines the whole point it might be trying to make – that these were dangerous men – by succumbing to romanticism at its very end. As the captured old lags await trial, we first see them laughing and joking with each other as they prep for court and then, as they walk towards the dock, the film throws up old footage of the actors from the 60s, 70s and 80s, stressing their romanticism. Look, the film seems to be saying: these were criminals, but they were old fashioned criminals, remember when Britain used to make its own underdog crims instead of being awash with hardened, violent gangs? It’s hard to take. And it’s like the whole film. A tonal mess that finally absolves the robbers who ruined lives and who still haven’t returned almost £10 million of ordinary people’s goods. King of Thieves isn’t charming. It’s alarming.

Now You See Me (2013)

A gang of magicians get up to all sorts of antics in light and empty caper Now You See Me

Director: Louis Leterrier

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg (J Daniel Atlas), Woody Harrelson (Merritt McKinney), Isla Fisher (Henley Reeves), Dave Franco (Jack Wilder), Mark Ruffalo (Agent Dylan Rhodes), Mélanie Laurent (Agent Alma Dray), Morgan Freeman (Thaddeus Bradley), Michael Caine (Arthur Tressler), Michael Kelly (Agent Fuller), Common (Agent Evans)

Sometimes the simplest tricks are the best. Remember David Blaine? All his huge illusions and stunts weren’t worth thruppence compared to the simple awe of watching him perform card tricks in front of stunned regular folks in the streets. This film is pretty much the same, a dazzlingly shot con-trick of a film that wants to reveal a stream of tricks that it was holding up its sleeves over its runtime, each twist being less and less impactful. The most magic thing in this is the sleight of hand card trick Jesse Eisenberg performs at the start of the film – after that it’s like watching your soul drain away over two hours under an onslaught of wham-bam twists.

Anyway, J Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) are a ragtag bunch of professional magicians, hypnotists, stunt performers and conmen who are recruited by a shadowy magical organisation known only as The Eye for reasons unknown. One year later they are performing huge stadium gigs, with the support of millionaire insurance man Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), as The Four Horseman. During their first show they magic millions of Euros out of a bank in Paris while performing in Las Vegas – a stunt that attracts the attention of the FBI and Interpol who send agents Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) and Alma Dray (Mélanie Laurent) to investigate. Meanwhile, the Horsemen are on the run from the law, and still working towards ends unknown, while dodging magic debunker Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman). But is anything as it seems?

The answer of course is no. But then what do you expect from a film that proudly announces (frequently) “the closer you look, the less you will see”. It’s a pretty good message for the film – but not in a good way – as Now You See Me is as insubstantial as air, a puff of showmanship so pleased with its twists and tricks that it completely fails to have a heart. By the time we get to the end of the film and realise almost everything we saw over its runtime wasn’t real you’ll feel disconnected rather than engaged.

In fact, as a heist/con movie, this isn’t that good. The formula depends on you thinking you’ve got it worked out and then BOOM you realise you didn’t. It also by and large depends on charming, playful leads (think Newman and Redford in The Sting) and on a sort of consistent logic where you get the satisfaction of pieces you didn’t even notice falling into place as vital clues. Now You See Me does none of this.

In fact, it’s so pleased to tell you that it pulled the wool over your eyes that it rushes several of its reveals with an indecent haste. It largely fails to sprinkle clues throughout the film and basically plays unfair with the whole audience. There are things you can never hope to work out as they are based on not being shown vital clues early on. Characters and the film carefully never reveal any hints of true allegiances or motivations until the last possible minute.

In fact it’s one of those films where most of the characters are, for large chunks of time, really pretending to be someone else. This can work, but it doesn’t here as most of the Horsemen are basically rather unlikeable arrogant arseholes. The four actors mostly coast through basic set-ups, and you’ll be pleased when they fade into the background in the second half of the move (all four of them are basically decoy protagonists, and the film shelves them when it can no longer think of a way of hiding their true motivations in plain sight any more). The real lead is actually Mark Ruffalo’s FBI agent, and Ruffalo is a charming, likeable, schleppy presence that you can root for, even if the plot takes us on a character journey with him that makes no real sense (the clue for this is the film’s references to a magician who buried a card in a tree years earlier for one trick). 

It’s flashy in its film making, and Leterrier has a workmanlike touch with making things look cooland putting the camera in interesting places. He has no real idea of character or pacing – the film is frequently quick, quick, slow – and he creates a film here that has nowhere near the brains it thinks it has. It’s all flash and no substance. Look too closely and you’ll see nothing there.

Amores Perros (2000)

Dogs, love and car crashes in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s debut feature Amores Perros

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Cast: Emilio Echevarría (El Chivo), Gael García Bernal (Octavio), Goya Toledo (Valeria), Álvaro Guerrero (Daniel), Vanessa Bauche (Susana), Jorge Salinas (Luis), Adriana Barraza (Octavio’s mother), Marco Pérez (Ramiro)

What links playboy kid Octavio (Gael García Bernal), model Valeria (Goya Toledo) whose career is so high it can only go downhill, and El Chivo (Emilio Echevarría) a hitman who lives like a scruffy hobo? Love of course! Well that and a near-fatal car accident that has life-changing effects for all three of them. And dogs too. They all love dogs. Iñárritu’s debut film plays like a mixture of Altman and Tarantino, throwing together three small-scale stories into something that feels electric and fast, but also strangely empty, as if it is skirting the surface of its characters without really delving into them.

Its interesting re-watching this film now, after Iñárritu has become a double Oscar winner and one of the world’s leading directors. The mastery of technique is all there in Amores Perros. Iñárritu’s style with the camera is fluid, intense and engrossing, and he uses a wide combination of fast-cut editing tricks, stylish camera work and handheld cameras that immerses the audience in the seedy underworld of Mexico City. As part of a wave of Latin American films made at the time, Amores Perros perhaps comes second only to City of God as an example of how to bring the danger and reality of the streets to the screen. Shot with a drained out style that makes everything feel even more grim, dirty and depressing than it probably is, Amores Perros is as sharp a dog bite of cinema as you could expect. 

Within this brilliant evocation of urban cinema work, Iñárritu crafts a series of three morality tales so universal in their structure and themes that they could just as easily been pulled from Chaucer or Boccaccio. It works as well, these three short films linked by common themes, cleverly structured narratively so that we learn more about each story as the other two unfold. Iñárritu structures the pivot of the story being the car crash that opens the film. The causes leading up to it are covered in the first story, with the events of the second story hinging on its effect on model Valeria in the other car, and the third spinning out the change of lifestyle it helps push on hitman El Chivo. Each story starts at different places in relation to others and each expands and deepens the overall picture we get of Mexico.

And it’s a place with its own underworld economy, powered by everything from murder and robbery to dog fighting. Octavio is a low-rent criminal (as is his brother) who ends up sucked into pitching his vicious Rottweiler into dog fighting. El Chivo lives in filth and dirt and takes commissions from corrupt cops to knock off targets. Both these stories hinge on inequality and desperation: Octavio and his family are working-class and have remarkably little. El Chivo is literally a tramp, a man who has turned his back on his old affluent life in disgust. The people they deal with are hoodlums and criminals and the few middle-class people who intrude into their lives do so with contempt. It’s all particularly obvious when, in the middle chapter, we head into the world of model Valeria and her lover, magazine editor Daniel – although even they are struggling to make ends meet.

It’s this middle story that actually makes for a fascinating centre point in the story. Valeria is crippled in the car accident, bed-ridden and disabled in the very week that Daniel has finally left his wife and children to be with her. Daniel (well played with a growing frustration and disappointment by Álvaro Guerrero) increasingly finds it hard to keep his patience with the disappointed and increasingly despairing Valeria (affecting work by Goya Toledo). This story of romantic, illicit love turned far too quickly into a burdensome marriage filled with dependencies has a universal tragedy to it. Their problems hinge around the disappearance of Valeria’s beloved dog, which may or may not be trapped under the damaged floorboards of the flat, a despair that becomes an obsession for Valeria and a constant burden for Daniel.

Valeria’s love for a dog becomes a substitute for the disappointing, passion-free relationship that she and Daniel find themselves locked into (Daniel even takes to calling his ex-wife to hear her voice). Dogs are more of a tool to Octavio. His vicious Rottweiler is his route to the money he needs to get his brother’s wife to elope with him. Gael Garcia Bernal plays Octavio with the edgy, simmering energy that powered so many Latin American films of the era, his face a mixture of surly resentment and romantic ambition. Octavio’s passionate flings with his sister-in-law have a youthful immaturity to them, that even she seems to recognise (his brother, while a somewhat absent husband, is clearly someone she relates to far more than the sexy Octavio). Discovering his dog’s capability for violence, he moves into the underworld of dog fighting, opening himself up to a world of trouble.

This use of dogs as a tool for greed and ambition perhaps reflects Octavio’s lack of emotional maturity and understanding of the impact of building a future with his sister-in-law, no matter how much he may wish to run away. For hitman El Chivo surprisingly, dogs are instead surrogate loves and emotional partners who have replaced the family (and indeed his regard for people in general) that he gave up long ago. Played with an expert anger masking deep sadness and self-loathing by Emilio Echevarría, El Chivo loves his dogs with all the intensity and care that is lacking from his relationship with humans. It’s this that gives El Chivo the self-regard that allows him to begin to change and rebuild his life.

Iñárritu’s primal film handles these universal themes of love and despair with intelligence and energy, even if it’s essentially three tales that play out more or less as you might expect. Because this film is essentially a collection of age-old morality tales, handsomely mounted but fundamentally predictable. What might you really learn about human nature from this film? I’m not sure. Because this is a pretty standard, even narratively safe drama, for all the minor tricks it plays with timelines. I’m not joking when I say this would not look out of place in The Canterbury Tales – and the moral issues it presents are lacking in shades of grey. Adulterers are punished, cheaters do not prosper, the “bad” are generally punished and for all that one of our characters is a hitman, he’s repeatedly shown to have more depth and hinterland than most of the rest of the characters in there.

It’s an interesting reflection on Iñárritu. He is without a doubt a major director of cinema, whose skills with the camera and editing are flawless. He creates here a film that is absolutely striking in its vibrancy and cinematic technique and its immediacy. But is it also a film that is a little too much about the mechanics of the stories rather than really invested in the stories themselves? I think it might be. Iñárritu is a master showman, but not necessarily a great storyteller and I think Amores Perros is a great example of that.

Public Enemies (2009)

Johnny Depp rides into action as John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s underwhelming Public Enemies

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Johnny Depp (John Dillinger), Christian Bale (FBI Special Agent Melvin Purvis), Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette), Billy Crudup (J Edgar Hoover), Stephen Dorff (Homar van Meter), Stephen Lang (Agent Charles Winstead), Stephen Graham (Baby Face Nelson), Jason Clarke (Red Hamilton), David Wenham (Harry Pierpont), Spencer Garrett (Tommy Carroll), Christian Stolte (Charles Makley), Giovanni Ribisi (Alvin Karpis), Bill Camp (Frank Nitti), Branka Katic (Anna Sage)

Michael Mann has an affinity for crime films. With Heat as one of his calling cards, Public Enemies is his attempt to do the same in the classic prohibition and bank robbery era of the 1920s. The guys going head-to-head this time?  John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), coolest robber there is, an icon of the criminal classes, and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) rigid and committed FBI agent. Public Enemies however fails to match Heat, falling part way between history lesson and action thriller. Covering the last few years of Dillinger’s life, and the rise of the FBI, it’s a cold, strangely uninvolving film mixed with a few stand out action scenes where tommy guns go blazing.

One of the first things it impossible to miss about the film is Mann’s decision to shoot the film using HD video cameras. The advantages of this is it gives much of the film an immediacy and modern look that throws the viewer into the middle of the action and makes this at times look and feel like a piece of news reel footage rather than a period piece. The camera choice allows Mann to put the camera right into the action, capturing every detail at a fast pace. The film has the look at times of a genuine documentary, and removing the richness of film also gives it the air of being caught on a phone, like some of this was some sort of found footage. Or rather, a phone that has been handled by a gifted cinematographer for perfect framing.

The downside of the choice of HD camera is that it makes the film at times look rather like a behind-the-scenes DVD documentary, with its untextured shadows and lack of lighting. Frankly at points it makes the film look bizarrely a little bit dull in places, or unusually unprofessional. Personally, I feel the benefits it gives in immediacy are cancelled out by this. But that’s just me.

Away from Mann’s shooting style – and his usual high octane skill of cutting and assembling action scenes – the film showpieces a strange lack of insight into its characters or any real developments of their hinterland. This is particularly so in the case of Purvis who never comes to life either in the film’s staging of him, or in Bale’s firm jawed, muted performance. When the final film caption throws up news of his later resignation and years later possible suicide it doesn’t make you question things you have seen in the film or feel like a logical progression: it just doesn’t tally up at all. 

The film does get some material out of how both sides play the media game. Purvis is a reluctant but fairly skilled player. His boss J Edgar Hoover (rather well played by Billy Crudup in one of the films best performances) is obsessed with spinning the nascent FBI to the media – half his scenes are bookended by press conferences – and his primary motivation is to exhibit himself to the media as the only logical choice for leading the FBI and the essentialness that it gains the powers it needs. Similarly, Dillinger and his fellow criminals delight in their media profile and do their damnedest to build up images of themselves as Robin Hoods (without the giving to the poor of course).

This is captured in Johnny Depp’s charismatic performance as Dillinger, a brooding, intense figure who would like to see himself as a sort of poet of the underworld. Dillinger talks about the banks money being their only interest and is frequently charming with an edge with regular people. He prefers bloodless robberies as they are cleaner and demonstrates a genuine sense of romantic openness with his girlfriend Billie. However, he is no angel. While he does not use violence as a first resort, he has no hesitation about using it as a second and will happily put bystanders at risk and rough up bank staff to get what he wants. He talks of escaping, but it’s clear that the game is an addiction for him and the danger is enjoyable – he takes an illicit thrill at one point of sitting in a cinema while his mugshot appears on the screen, wondering if anyone will dare spot him.

Depp’s performance is the finest thing in the film, a subtle and intelligent tightrope walk that teases depths that are perhaps not there, and suggests sympathies and agendas he perhaps does not have. While the character remains unknowable, you sense a great complexity and conflict there somewhere. He’s helped by being given a great actress like Marion Cottilard to play off, who makes Billie much more than just a gangster’s moll.

There is potential in the film, but it never really comes to life. For all the exciting shoot outs and drama, none of its characters are engaging or really interesting. The rest of the supporting cast feel like pieces to be moved around the board – many disappear with no real trace – and their fates pre-ordained by the demands of the plot. It makes for a rather flat experience, full of style, but never making you invest in it.

American Hustle (2013)

Glamour and confidence tricks in David O. Russell’s flashy American Hustle

Director: David O. Russell

Cast: Christian Bale (Irving Rosenfeld), Amy Adams (Sydney Prosser), Bradley Cooper (Richie DiMaso), Jennifer Lawrence (Rosalyn Rosenfeld), Jeremy Renner (Mayor Carmine Polito), Louis CK (Stoddard Thorsen), Jack Huston (Pete Musane), Michael Peña (Paco Hernandez/Sheik), Elisabeth Röhm (Dolly Polito), Shea Whigham (Carl Elway), Alessandro Nivola (Anthony Amada), Robert De Niro (Victor Tellegio)

In 2013, American Hustle was nominated for ten Oscars and won none of them. Somehow, being invited to the big party but not receiving any prizes was strangely fitting for a film about small time grifters forced into a big game way beyond their control. Russell’s film is like a celebration of his strengths and weaknesses as a director: it’s stuffed with some very good (if rather mannered) performances, offers lots of dynamic film making, but is still basically a rather cold and arch film that’s hard to really invest in – rather like a con game in itself.

In 1978, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) is a small-time grafter, running scams with his partner and lover Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams), who uses the identity of a young English aristocrat “Lady Edith Greenslly”. Rosenfeld longs to leave his unstable, selfish wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) for Sydney, but fears he will lose all his access to his adopted son. Rosenfeld and Prosser’s career of clever investment frauds is brought to an end when Prosser is caught red-handed by FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper). DiMaso forces the pair into his entrapment operation, targeting New Jersey politicians with offers of bribes as part of a Fake Sheik investment. Initially it targets Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), but the operation quickly expands, as the ambitious and impulsive DiMaso constantly follows every connection and the operation expands to dangerous levels, taking in the mafia. Scared, Rosenfeld and Prosser desperately try to play both ends against the middle.

American Hustle is a decent film, which pulls together the sort of capers, turmoil and antics that you would expect from a film about a long con. It throws into the melting pot the vibes of several other films, from The Sting to Goodfellas, and asks us to admire the results. Russell encourages the actors to play it with an edgy verisimilitude that pretty much works as a metaphor for con men. Each performance is an effective display of high-wire character acting work laced with arch, studied tricks. But only rarely do you get a sense of something that’s real.

That’s part of a film that wants to have a cake and eat it as well. It’s striking in the entire story that the most sympathetic character is the initial target, Jeremy Renner’s well-meaning, passionate New Jersey politician, bamboozled into taking a bribe (money he mostly uses in the local community) because he is convinced it’s a crucial part of getting Arab investment. It’s even more striking that the most honest, subdued (and deadly) character is the Mafia kingpin Victor Tellegio, played with chilling menace by an unbilled Robert DeNiro. Nearly everyone else on the side of the entrapment operation is pretty much a selfish prick or verging on the unhinged.

But then that’s part of the point of the film, which throws two people who know what they are doing (Rosenfeld and Prosser) at the mercy of people playing with fire (Roselyn and in particular DiMaso, a permed, tightly-wound powderkeg). This is one hell of a performance from Bradley Cooper – and a sign again after Silver Linings Playbook that Russell and he have a natural understanding. Cooper is a force of nature, a bundle of terrible impulses combined with an utter lack of shame or self-control, who is quite happy to trample over everyone to get what he wants and has no regard whatsoever for the danger he puts himself and others into. Utterly unpredictable, he never sticks to a plan, veers between rage and hysterical laughter and, worst of all, is always convinced he’s right.

It’s DiMaso who spins the operation into dangerous waters with his vaulting ambition to land yet another big fish, recklessly peddling insubstantial, unprepared lies on top of each other – to the terror and horror of practised peddlar of bullshit Rosenfeld, whose whole successful schtick is based on saying “no” and having the mark do all the desperate work. DiMaso’s approach not only puts the operation at risk, it puts lives at risk – not that DiMaso cares, preoccupied as he is with his childish one-upmanship with his boss and a teenage sexual obsession with Prosser.

What chance do the (mostly) small-fish politicians and local figures have, whose lives are placed on the altar of DiMaso’s ambition? It’s no wonder that, late in the film, our conmen heroes start to feel guilt and remorse – none more so than Irving Rosenfeld. Played by Christian Bale with the sort of tricksy, Olivier-ish disguises that he so loves (in this case increased weight, a balding comb-over and a pair of tinged glasses he obsessively fiddles with), Rosenfeld is an operator happy with the level he is working at and incredibly wary of stepping up into the dangerous big leagues. Justifiably convinced of his own professionalism at fleecing money and winning trust, Rosenfeld has no problem with taking money from the selfish but every problem in the world with destroying the life of a fundamentally honest man. Bale’s performance, for all the tricks, manages to successfully build a picture of a selfish man who believes himself in his way to be honest in a way and is just trying to make his way.

That way also involves balancing between two very different women. Amy Adams does decent work as a blowsy fake-aristocrat, sporting a series of tops with neck lines that literally plunge down to her waist, although she is perhaps a little too “nice girl next door” to really convince as the love-em-to-manipulate-them Prosser. She’s not also helped by the script giving her an ill-defined arc of self-doubt linked to pretending to be someone else. Sweet as the genuine love can be her between her and Rosenfeld – and excellent as her chemistry is between Bale and Cooper – it’s the character who remains the least knowable in the film.

Also not helping is the fact that Jennifer Lawrence burns through the film as Rosalyn, the sort of electric, larger-than-life but still very real performance of arrogance, selfishness, dangerous stupidity and greed that marked her out as a major actress. Whether inadvertently putting Rosenfeld’s life at risk through blabbing details she’s half-overheard and half-understood, cleaning the kitchen while singing an aggressive rendition of Live and Let Die or nearly burning the house down because she won’t believe metal can’t go in “the science oven” (aka microwave), Lawrence is the film’s MVP.

Russell’s film showcases all these actors brilliantly, but his overall story remains a little cold and not as clever as it thinks. With a film about conmen you expect a final rugpull – and this film sort of manages one – but the story telling to take us there isn’t quite as articulate and clever as it needs to be in order to be really satisfying. Perhaps it’s the film’s ragged, hip, indie style of telling – or the air that the actors are making a lot of this stuff up as they go with edgy, semi-improvised performances – but the film never really engrosses or engages. For all that we see the inner worlds of Rosenfeld and Prosser, I can’t say I really, truly cared what happened to them. 

Instead Russell focuses on the marshalling of his resources, and cool, slick film-making. He uses expert camera work and editing, mixed with a superbly chosen soundtrack, overlaid with voiceover, sudden transitions, some narrative jumps and a vibrant sense of cool to make a story that finally feels a little too much like a style-over-substance trick – in fact a con game all of its very own, as enjoyable and entertaining as the rest of the film, but when it finishes you realise your pockets are empty.

The Reckless Moment (1949)

James Mason and Joan Bennett feel Reckless Moment pulls them toward temptation

Director: Max Ophüls

Cast: James Mason (Martin Donnelly), Joan Bennett (Lucia Harper), Geraldine Brooks (Bea Harper), Henry O’Neill (Tom Harper), Shepperd Strudwick (Ted Darby), David Bair (David Harper), Roy Roberts (Nagel), Frances E Williams (Sybil)

It’s a situation anyone could find themselves in: your daughter is infatuated with someone totally unsuitable, and despite all your efforts you can’t get her to shake him off. What’s perhaps more unusual is when the man turns up dead after an accident – but in such a way it looks like your daughter has bumped him off. What lengths will you go to, to save her from prison? That’s the problem faced by Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) – and it’s made even more complex by the fact that the truth is out there and she’s being blackmailed by surprisingly sensitive small-time crook Martin Donnelly (James Mason), who finds himself developing feelings for Lucia.

Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment is an enjoyable enough noir-thriller, that mixes a wonderful sense of its locations with a perverted romanticism that first expresses itself through the daughter’s infatuation with a pathetic bent art dealer and then through the love blackmailer Martin Donnelly feels for his victim (and she for him). But it’s also a film about women, and how alone they can be when dealing with problems. Lucia’s husband is a never-seen presence on the end of a phone (busy building a bridge in Germany), her father-in-law is charming but useless and the two other men are criminals intruding into her life.

In fact this is quite ahead of its time with its thinking around women. Far from the usual tropes of a femme fatale, instead Mason takes on that role, while the mother turns out to be practical, brave and dedicated to keeping her family safe – while still more than a little open to illicit feelings of attraction. Lucia still has to balance all this with putting up a front of domestic business-as-usual with her family, not letting them see even a trace of the problems (including her daughter who is blissfully unaware of the situation she has landed her mother in). 

Ophüls’ directs this with a moody intensity, with a wonderful use of the LA backgrounds, particularly of the boat landing where much of the crucial action takes place. His camera placement is impeccable, and he finds a number of interesting and striking angles to throw events into a sharp relief. It’s a beautifully shot film, with wonderful use of black and white, and hints of Ophüls’ background in German expressionist cinema. His camera constantly manages to put us in the shoes of Lucia with tracking shots (another Ophüls’ trademark) loyally following her actions and placing the viewers into her perspective of events to help build out bonds with her. 

It’s a bond that obviously Donnelly ends up feeling very strongly tied to. James Mason enters the picture surprisingly late, and the film’s short length (less than 80 minutes) means many of the developments around the blackmail end up feeling rather rushed. Perhaps the plot didn’t even need the blackmail angle – there could have been more than enough tension of Lucia dodging the police case that surely should have built around her. Instead, the blackmail plot often feels rather forced, not least due to the build of a romantic subplot between the two characters.

It’s a romance that never quite rings true, partly because we never get the time for it to breathe. It seems forced and bolted onto the film because it is expected, rather than something that grows organically. It leads to sudden plot leaps, with Donnelly moving swiftly from business like to buying gifts and even offering to pay part of the blackmail for her to his shady boss. I’m not sure that the film ever earns this leap with its rushed runtime. It never pulls together into a romance that we can really believe in – and Lucia is such a carefully restrained and standoffish character that we don’t always get a sense of the emotions that she is carrying below the surface. 

Despite this Joan Bennett does a decent job as the heroine, an intriguing and rather admirable character who gets caught up in wild and crazy events but never lets them overwhelm her. Indeed, Ophüls’ stresses her calmness and practicality at several points, never shaken by demands of events and responding with ingenuity and calm to a range of circumstances. Bennett might not be the most charismatic actress, but she does a very good job here. James Mason struggles slightly with his slightly incoherent character arc, but as a reluctant heavy he does a marvellous job here, while mastering the sense of ruffled, shabby charm Donnelly has. It does help believe that he might contribute to a reckless moment of attraction from Lucia.

The Reckless Moment is a well-made B movie, that Ophüls’ adds a great deal to with his empathy for Lucia and stylishly smooth film-making. It makes for a very polished film, which on its actual character and plot beats doesn’t really always make a great deal of sense – rushing us into relationships and feelings that it doesn’t always feel the film justifies. But despite that there is just enough style here, even if this is always a film destined for the second tier of classics.