BRIGHTON ROCK (1947) ** Noire Brittania with the odd eye shovel, unsettling to a degree that the preface assures us that this era of organized crime is over. Oh, good then . What's depicted is something different-internationalists shoving locals to the side. The Brighton carnival is always good for a brief digression that should bring relief, but instead John Boulting uses it like Hitchcock to make you feel strung out, strung along strung out. I don't know that I think any of the performances are great-Richard Attenborough looks like a guy who would be eaten alive by real mobsters but I guess that's kind of what happens (did it take much more than a black heart and weirdness in those days, there?)-but there is an underlying truth to the characters that's discomforting: the desperate waitress, the slimeball lawyer coerced, the gangland figures great and small... I guess you're supposed to see solace somewhere but I didn't, which is the noire in it, I guess.
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