Prison letters sent by ‘public enemy No 1’ Jacques Mesrine to his girlfriend Jeanne Schneider to be sold at auction
Bankrobber and serial prison escapee Jacques Mesrine had many names during his two-decade criminal career in the 1960s and 70s.
In disguise and on the run from police, he made headlines as “the man of a thousand faces” and “public enemy number one”. In Canada and the US with his girlfriend, Jeanne Schneider, the couple were nicknamed France’s Bonnie and Clyde.
Continue reading...At a special Tribeca film festival event, the stars of Michael Mann’s acclaimed crime saga reminisced while offering suggestions of who could play them in a remake
Any misgivings about terseness at a Q&A panel dedicated to Heat, a film in which men prefer to let their automatic rifles talk about their feelings for them, were quickly put to one side last night at the dazzling United Palace theater in Manhattan’s Washington Heights.
The Tribeca film festival event dedicated to the 1995 crime classic from Michael Mann – who couldn’t attend due to a positive Covid test, but took care to record a video message from the Italian set of his forthcoming Enzo Ferrari movie, wistfully recalling his initial pitch all those years ago at a Broadway Diner lunch – began with an out-of-the-gate standing ovation for the assembled talent: producer Art Linson, as well as stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, a couple of guys unable to get a cup of coffee in New York without a round of applause. Things only got rowdier from there.
Continue reading...Roger Michell’s final feature retells story of the cussed Newcastle pensioner who stole a Goya portrait in protest at government spending priorities
For what has become his final feature film, director Roger Michell made this sweet-natured and genial comedy in the spirit of Ealing, which bobs up like a ping pong ball on a water-fountain. It is based on the true story of Kempton Bunton, the Newcastle bus driver who in 1965 was had up at the Old Bailey for stealing Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from London’s National Gallery. The mystery of its disappearance had so electrified the media that there was even a gag about it in the James Bond film Dr No, using a copy personally painted by the legendary production designer Ken Adam, which was itself stolen. Maybe there should be a film about that as well.
The court heard this was Bunton’s protest at government misuse of taxpayers’ money (the painting had been saved for the nation at some cost) and to publicise his demand for pensioners to be given free TV licences. (This film features the usual “historical coda” sentences over the closing credits, and one sentimentally records that free TV licences for the over-75s were finally introduced in 2000. But no mention of these being taken away again in 2020.)
Continue reading...Branagh’s spirited performance as Poirot and a big-name ensemble cast can’t keep this stale and two-dimensional whodunnit afloat
Long coronavirally delayed, Kenneth Branagh’s latest Agatha Christie movie puffs effortfully into harbour. It’s the classic whodunnit about a murder on a steamer making its way down the river in Egypt with an Anglo-American boatful of waxy-faced cameos aboard. The horrible homicide means that one of the passengers will have to spring into action, and this is of course the amply moustached Hercule Poirot, played by Branagh himself. It is Poirot who interviews suspects, supervises corpse-storage in the ship’s galley freezer cabinet and delivers the final unmasking – and all without the captain insisting that the Egyptian police should possibly get involved.
Screenwriter Michael Green has adapted the 1937 novel with some new inventions: some people of colour are introduced, and Christie’s intense dislike for her wealthy-hypocrite leftwing character has been dialled down. Most startlingly, Green invents a very good prelude showing the young Poirot’s service in the trenches of the first world war, and the origin of that moustache. Nothing in the rest of this rather stale and two-dimensional tale matches the brio of that opening.
Continue reading...The off-the-leash cop archetype was cemented with Don Siegel’s taut, provocative thriller that neither condemns or condones extreme measures
Harry Callahan is the cop we’ve been warned about. Though this week marks fifty years since Don Siegel’s genre-defining thriller Dirty Harry busted into cinemas with Smith & Wessons blazing, the general profile of dangerous, off-the-leash law enforcement solidified over the last half-decade of public discourse sounds like it could’ve been traced from the film’s example. Played with a scowl of blanket disgust by Clint Eastwood – Paul Newman had passed on the role as “too right-wing” – San Francisco PD’s top inspector is more than your standard-issue misanthrope. He’s an equal-opportunity bigot, contemptuous of every ethnic group rattled off by a fellow officer in a laundry list of slurs. He’ll readily resort to violence in his work, not above a bit of crude torture to extract information from a perp with a bullet wound. And most hazardous of all, he believes himself unanswerable to anyone but God, who he’d probably just meet with the same glowering frown.
From its earliest stages of development, the script conceived by husband-and-wife team Harry and Rita Fink made clear that Harry’s no boy Scout, but partisans on either side of the ideological aisle looking for affirmation in their stance will be disappointed. Those with hopes for an out-and-out denunciation of this brutish approach to policing have another thing coming, the coarser methods often validated by necessity, as if Harry’s the last line of defense for a society teetering on the brink of anarchy. (The guy can’t even get a hot dog without a bank robbery demanding his attention.) Any gung-ho types walking away as converted Calla-fans have also missed something crucial, however, blind to his placelessness in the city he’s sworn to protect. Neither condemning nor condoning his actions, the film offers what may be the clearest image of the archetypal cop’s self-perception as the only one willing to do the dirty jobs holding America together, even if it means getting dirty yourself.
Continue reading...Designer brand reaps the benefit of Ridley Scott’s movie telling the story of the killing of firm’s ex-boss
When is murder good for business? When it is made into a Hollywood movie, for one – and when that film stars Lady Gaga. House of Gucci, the Ridley Scott feature released last week to mixed reviews, has sent interest in the Gucci brand soaring.
Searches for Gucci clothing were up 73% week on week, according to e-commerce aggregator Lovethesales.com on Friday, with a leap of 257% for bags and 75% for sliders. The figures suggest that the luxury brand stands only to gain from Hollywood’s telling of the story ofthe glamorous Patrizia Reggiani, who hired a hitman in 1995 to kill her ex-husband Maurizio Gucci, the former head of the fashion label.
Continue reading...Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci stars Lady Gaga in a tale of fashion and murder. But is true crime – once the soul of cinema, from thrillers and horrors to westerns – now outgrowing the big screen?
What took you so long, House of Gucci? This story was destined to become a movie from the moment the bullet left fashion heir Maurizio Gucci dead outside his Milan office in March 1995 – shot, a witness said, by a hitman with a “beautiful, clean hand”. The film by Ridley Scott now finally arrives dripping with star power, and Lady Gaga as Gucci’s ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani. But the story alone was enough: a glittering tickbox of money, revenge and a villainess kept company in jail by an illicit pet ferret called Bambi.
True crime gold. So why, now that the film is actually here, does the Gucci case feel a strange fit for a movie after all? Put it down to timing. The film’s development began in entertainment prehistory: 2006. Back then, a lavish movie was still the grand prize for any news story, and true crime – that trashbag genre – would simply be glad of the association. Now though, film and true crime have the air of an estranged couple. Had Maurizio Gucci been gunned down on Via Palestro last week, Netflix would already have the rights and the podcast would be on Spotify.
Continue reading...Le Désordre et la Nuit, shown as part of a retrospective for the great thriller director at Lyon’s Lumière film festival, is a well-crafted treat for fans of the genre
A big feature, and an even bigger pleasure, of this year’s Lumière film festival in Lyon is the retrospective for the French master of policiers and crime, Gilles Grangier, a director who enjoyed great commercial success in movies and later in TV from the 1950s to the 80s, working with actors such as Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura and the great screenwriter Michel Audiard (father of Jacques). He was a working-class film-maker who came up from the streets of Paris, and started in the movies as a stuntman, grip, prop boy, any job he could get.
Grangier is a name perhaps eclipsed now by Jean-Pierre Melville and made to feel obsolete in the 60s by the New Wave as he was making the kind of well-crafted, unpretentious genre pictures that the new generation of revolutionaries affected to despise (while admiring the Hollywood equivalent). But his movies here have been a revelation – the late Bertrand Tavernier, the founder of this festival, was always a great ally of Grangier’s – particularly his amazingly dry, witty, briskly unsentimental lowlife crime melodrama Le Désordre et la Nuit from 1958. This thriller was adapted by Grangier and Audiard from a novel by the French wartime journalist Jacques Robert, celebrated for his 1945 reports from Berlin and being one of the few writers who saw the inside of Hitler’s bunker.
Continue reading...Michael Gandolfini is goosebump-inducing as the young Tony Soprano, amid race riots and antagonism towards rival African American gangs
Maybe it was inevitable that the greatest TV show in history should spawn a feature-length prequel that is somehow disappointing: it is watchable but weirdly obtuse with a tricksy narrative reveal that doesn’t add much. The Many Saints of Newark, co-written by the Sopranos’ legendary creator David Chase and directed by Alan Taylor, gives us the childhood of a leader: the teenage Tony Soprano, growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, specifically the time of the 1967 Newark riots, which caused the “white flight” racism that explains the older Tony having that palatial home way out there in the suburbs that he drives up to in the opening credits each episode.
Young Tony is portrayed with goosebump-inducing deja vu by Michael Gandolfini, son of the late James Gandolfini, who played the role on TV. Tony’s sleepy-eyed sensitivity, his melancholy, his glowering resentment and dangerous hurt feelings are there in embryo. His father, Johnny, is played by Jon Bernthal, and his terrifying mother Livia by Vera Farmiga who gives a superb rendering of Livia’s own haughty mannerisms. But you could spend this entire movie hanging on for the first sign of those all-important petit mal fainting fits that the TV show said originated in Tony’s dad. Is history being rewritten, or misrememberings corrected?
Continue reading...Ahead of the Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark hitting cinemas, here are 30 organised crime flicks you must see before you sleep with the fishes
Our criteria here is films featuring actual mobsters and the organised crime milieu – as opposed to hitmen, heists or bank robbers. Stefano Sollima’s punchy neo-noir, set in 2011, fits the bill with its imbroglio of crime families, political corruption and Rome real estate. Financed by Netflix, this is essentially a feature-length pilot for the addictive Suburra: Blood on Rome prequel series.
Continue reading...The footballer-turned-movie hard man is back, starring in a new Footsoldier film. He talks about how his film and TV career exploded and refinding his dignity
I am, obviously, scared of Vinnie Jones. Even though he is calling from New York, 3,000 miles and five hours away, I keep expecting him to click his neck three times and pull me into a breathless headlock. But instead, he is sleepy and then charming, and doesn’t threaten to kick my face in once.
He is sleepy because he was up until 2.30am shooting Law & Order: Organized Crime, in which he appears in the recurring role of Albanian gangster Albi. “Going toe-to-toe with Christopher Meloni,” he smiles, “a legend in the acting world.”
Continue reading...Aziah ‘Zola’ Wells’s viral story of her crazily dangerous 2015 trip to Florida in search of pole-dancing money is brought to the screen with seductive comedy
In 2015, a part-time dancer from Detroit called Aziah “Zola” Wells went viral with a cheeky Twitter thread purporting to tell the pulp-factual tale of her recent, crazily dangerous road trip to Florida with someone called Jessica, whom she’d only just met. This woman had persuaded Zola there was big money in pole-dancing for rich clients in Tampa, but Zola had to share the car with Jessica’s creepy boyfriend and even creepier pimp, and soon it was clear that Zola was going to have to do much more than dance. She was in way over her head.
Or was she? Followers of Zola’s posts loved them at least partly for how outrageously unreliable they were: Zola was clearly embellishing, or pre-emptively giving her side of the story before Jessica did the same. Now this has been turned into a very entertaining lowlife crime comedy from director and co-writer Janicza Bravo, a film that preserves the fishy flavour of the online original – if perhaps only semi-intentionally – and has interesting things to say about the exhaustingly performative and self-promotional world of social media.
Continue reading...The trailer for American Boogeyman, yet another film to cast a handsome actor as a serial killer, faces backlash. Who is asking for more Bundy content?
Ted Bundy, the serial killer convicted of murdering more than 30 women in the 1970s who probably killed upwards of 100 whose names receive little attention, once mused, in interviews on death row, that he hoped his story would sell. Thirty-two years after his death by electric chair, Bundy seems to have been prescient about a curiosity with the mild-looking sociopath. The past couple years has seen a veritable “Bundy binge” in true crime content: a two-hour Oxygen special, too many podcasts to list, the Netflix docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes and the biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, starring Zac Efron as a suave Bundy.
Related: Just another pretty face: should Hollywood stop giving bad guys a face-lift?
Continue reading...Plot holes trip up the Iranian director’s drama of a slippery man’s desperate efforts to trick his way out of debtors’ prison
Asghar Farhadi has made a tangled film about the tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive, in that calmly observant, realist yet information-withholding style with which this director made his name. In way, A Hero is a slice-of-life story, in which the “i”s and the “t”s are not necessarily dotted and crossed like a regular screenplay; it has the unsatisfactory, unclear messiness that real life has. There is plenty of interest here - and yet I have to admit to slight reservations about the melodramatic contrivances, which stretch credulity a little.
A Hero is a film that works because of a clever and subtle performance from Amir Jadidi as Rahim, a divorced father who has just been released from jail on a two-day parole, having been imprisoned for debt. He is a man with a bright yet strange, desperate smile, like one of the poor relations in Dickens. He is looking forward to being reunited with his girlfriend, his supportive sister and his beloved son – a gentle, sensitive boy with a speech impediment. Rahim is a man who believes that some sort of charming niceness might still get him get out of a jam. But he has a very specific plan for cancelling his prison sentence. His girlfriend has found a handbag in the street containing what appear to be gold coins: if they could sell them to a gold dealer, might that not raise enough for a deposit to persuade his creditor to forgive the debt?
Continue reading...From his breakthrough in Deliverance to a memorable turn in Toy Story 3, the authenticity of Beatty’s middleman gone bad made him the perfect co-star – and often stole the show
If ever a character actor personified the “good ol’ boy” archetype of Hollywood’s new cinema of the 1970s it was Ned Beatty from Louisville, Kentucky, whose broad, open, good-natured face seemed so often to be covered with a sheen of sweat – either from suppressed guilt, or tension, from discomfort in whatever sweltering southern clime he happened to find himself. His was a smiley face bounded by its prosperous double-chin and nascent combover, a face that lent reality and approachability to the movies: an authentic and worldly presence.
Ned Beatty had the hardest role to play: the middle-ranking ordinary guy: lawyer, cop, official, politician and maybe, effectively, the wingman to the conventionally better-looking male leads, and in his 70s movie heyday this tended to mean Burt Reynolds, with whom he starred in six films, including, of course, Beatty’s brilliant and brutal breakthrough: Deliverance (1972), written by James Dickey and directed by John Boorman, in which Reynolds’s sinister alpha male businessman leads his buddies Beatty, Jon Voight and Ronny Cox on a vacation canoeing trip through the deepest Georgia wilderness only to come into horrible contact with hillbillies playing banjos and bearing grudges.
Continue reading...This contemporary western about a young Texan fugitive who flees south of the border is handsomely shot but didactic
Just north of the border between the United States and Mexico, the Greer family – patriarch Bill (Frank Grillo), mom Monica (Andie MacDowell), and grown sons Lucas (Alex MacNicoll) and Jackson (Jake Allyn) – work the land as ranchers. They raise cattle, ride horses and, being red-blooded Texan types, play sports – in Jackson’s case well enough that he’s got a chance to go pro as a baseball player. They also spend the odd evening riding the range with a vigilante militia group, rounding up immigrants who may have crossed the border illegally, to “help” the border patrols. On one such night, Jackson joins his dad and big brother, even though they try to keep him out of this sort of thing so he can get out of Dodge and become a sports hero – and what do you know, the dumb lug ends up shooting and killing a boy (Alessio Valentini) just a little younger than himself. In the back no less.
Ashamed, distraught and worried that his father will try to take the rap for him, Jackson confesses to local Texas Ranger Ramirez (venerable character actor George Lopez), but then bolts across the border to Mexico on his trusty horse Sundance. Soon, the fugitive is learning some life lessons and about what Mexico is really like, and he becomes a hired hand for a nice middle-class family. A flirtatious friendship blooms between him and the family’s pretty daughter, Victoria (Esmeralda Pimentel), while he tries not to get caught by the dead kid’s dad Gustavo (Jorge A Jimenez) and a skeevy people-trafficking “coyote” (Andres Delgado), who are out to get him.
Continue reading...A father uses his obsession with the movies to help his daughter when she is unjustly suspected of murder
It turns out that cinephilia is a productive use of time after all. When his computer is searched, Li Weijie, protagonist of this perky Chinese thriller, has watched 838 films in a year – and he uses his superior knowledge of the seventh art to get his family out of a pickle. Chinese but living in northern Thailand, he scrapes by as an internet technician, but his daughter finds herself at the centre of a murder investigation after she accidentally kills the son of a police chief who was trying to blackmail her with smartphone-filmed rape footage.
A remake of the 2013 Malayalam film Drishyam, this big Chinese hit ultimately doffs the cap to Korean cinema: it is Jeong Keun-seob’s 2013 film Montage that inspires Li when he has to provide his family with an alibi.
Continue reading...This blood-splattered gangster flick with a romantic subplot follows Tae-Gu as he hides out from his enemies
This gleefully blood-splattered Korean gangster film with an unlikely romantic subplot looks for most of its running time like the sort of cult-friendly genre discovery one could watch and then crow over before an inevitable Hollywood remake comes out. That said, the ending is so relentlessly bleak that a faithful remake would be unlikely – while an unfaithful one with a happier conclusion would be absurd given the ruthless logic of writer-director Park Hoon-jung’s plotting.
The initiating setup is that after something really bad happens, moody pretty-boy gangster Tae-Gu (Eom Tae-goo) must hide out on a resort island in off-season before he is ultimately resettled in Vladivostok, Russia. En route he stays with a grumpy arms dealer, a former gangster himself, and that man’s troubled, taciturn niece Jae-Yeon (Jeon Yeo-been). But it soon transpires that there’s hidden depths in both Jae-Yeon and Tae-Gu, who after the de rigueur initial verbal sparring become unlikely friends – and maybe potential soul mates, especially when they end up bonding over their shared affection for mulhoe, a spicy raw fish soup which plays a significant role in the story. In fact, there are a lot of meals throughout, discussions of who is hungry and a key plot-furthering sit-down among gangsters in a restaurant that involves one of those huge rotating trivets typical of Korean restaurants so that people can share dishes more easily.
Continue reading...Prophetic, frenetic and shockingly brutal, the film became a British classic. For its 40th anniversary, Mirren and other cast members relive their roles in the menacing gangland masterpiece
It has been 40 years since the release of The Long Good Friday, a gangster film still revered as one of the best British movies of all time. Shot in London in the late 1970s and starring the late Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren, it told the story of an underworld boss trying desperately to stop the IRA from dismantling his empire.
The backdrop for the film was the London Docklands, then mostly undeveloped. With corrupt city planners in his pocket, Hoskins’ character – the pugnacious, barrel-chested Harold Shand – attempts to woo the New York mafia into a partnership to transform the area, selling the idea to them with a speech during a trip up the Thames on his yacht. “Our country is not an island any more,” he snarls. “We’re a leading European state. And I believe this is the decade in which London will become Europe’s capital … no other city in the world has got, right at its centre, such an opportunity for profitable progress.”
Continue reading...Spanish dramas such as Money Heist have been taking the world by storm in recent years. But why are film-makers now flooding to the country’s north-west to make their shows?
Rosa Vargas’s arrival in a small town in north-western Spain to investigate the disappearance of a young girl marked an unlikely milestone. Vargas is the fictional police detective in O sabor das margaridas (Bitter Daisies), which, in 2019 became the first series in Galician, a language spoken by fewer than 2.5 million people, to be broadcast by Netflix. The series became one of the top 10 most-watched non-English language shows in the UK and Ireland just a month after its international release.
A decade after Nordic noir captured the attention of international TV audiences, a TV genre some are calling “Galician noir” is emerging from the rainy corner of Spain. HBO made its debut in the Galician language last year with a Spanish-Portuguese miniseries Auga seca (Dry Water), a murder mystery set in the port city of Vigo, and was soon followed by the Galician-produced police thriller La unidad (The Unit) on the Spanish subscription platform Movistar+. More recently, El desorden que dejas (The Mess You Leave Behind), based on a novel by the screenwriter Carlos Montero, premiered on Netflix in December.
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