Art House Beat: Brighton Rock, The Man From London, Lourdes, Chastity, The ...
Brighton Rock (SIFF Cinema, April 2-8)
Dallow, Spicer, Pinkie, Cubitt…If those names seem familiar, it may be that you heard them cited in the Morrissey song, “Now My Heart is Full,” which goes on to say “Rush to danger / Wind up nowhere,” a fair summation of the 1948 British gangster picture, “Brighton Rock,” in which the aforementioned characters run about on Brighton Beach until finding their personal nowheres.
Blur’s Damon Albarn wrote of Morrissey in his song “Charmless Man” that “he would like to have been Ronnie Kray / But nature didn’t make him that way.” It is typical of British working class kids to manufacture fantasies of their lineage, which is most often Royal but sometimes criminal or, in the case of Brett Anderson, who imagines in his song “Daddy’s Speeding” that he is the son of James Dean, just about any celebrity figure. Morrissey could imagine himself friends with the four central characters of “Brighton Rock,” and Richard Attenborough’s Pinkie mght even be said to share the fashion sense of his current band members.
