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The Times (28/Aug/2008) - Dial M for must-see crime movies

(c) The Times (28/Aug/2008)

Dial M for must-see crime movies

What makes the perfect crime movie? Christopher Fowler goes beyond the usual suspects to find whodunnit

There comes a moment in The Dark Knight when you realise that you’ve been tricked into watching a different film. Batman has been given an impossible choice by the Joker. He can save the woman he loves, or the man who is Gotham’s only future hope. This isn’t a superhero movie at all but a crime thriller. Beneath the costumes there’s a classic four-hander: criminal, maverick fighter, love interest and lawman must clash, testing both their morality and mortality.

The crime film has come a long way, but in more than a century the basic plots have hardly changed. The Great Train Robbery was made in 1903, but it set the tone for years to come, drawing a line between right and wrong, then placing the cast on either side. Over the years, the blurring of that line is what still attracts film-makers and audiences to the subject.

With the TCM Crime Scene Festival opening in London next month for its seventh year, it seems that the line is more blurred than ever. In the same way that musicals evolved from the leaden hoofing of 42nd Street to the dark razzle-dazzle of Chicago, celluloid crime has passed through increasing levels of sophistication. Bogart and Cagney faced off in Angels with Dirty Faces just as the decent Sheriff Ed chases the insanely creepy Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, but nothing is as simple as it once was. The lawmen might be flawed and compromised, the outlaws victims, and we have to decide where we stand.

There are rules, however. First, there must be a punishable act. Then we watch the consequences and follow the perpetrators, because they’re usually more interesting than the law. Criminals divide into decent hitmen (Grosse Point Blank, Wild Target), glamorous burglars (The Thomas Crown Affair, The Pink Panther), femmes fatales (The Last Seduction, Double Indemnity), guilt-ridden innocents (Seance on a Wet Afternoon, A Simple Plan), honourable mobsters (Casino, A Better Tomorrow) and unrepentant monsters (Hannibal, Se7en). Plans always go wrong when those carrying them out are forced to improvise. Overconfident killers will be tripped up in courtrooms. Someone innocent will suffer and be avenged. And the heroes can become men only after they have sustained a number of neat cuts to the head. Plus, for true memorability, there should be some unanswered questions left at the end, although not as many as there are in Bogart’s incomprehensible The Big Sleep.

In a crime film the criminals know that they’re guilty, but in a noir thriller they’re dumb enough to think that they’re innocent. The noirs of the forties place us firmly on the side of the deluded sleazeballs. Kiss Me Deadly, with its cynical PI, hot mystery blonde and radioactive suitcase (stolen for everything from Repo Man to Pulp Fiction), is generally accepted as the best noir ever, but I’d plump for the poverty row Detour, with Tom Neal’s mean-mouthed nightclub pianist complaining: “When this drunk gave me a ten spot, I couldn’t get excited. What was it? A piece of paper crawling with germs.”

The film also contains another staple of the crime film: a jaw-dropping murder, in this case a telephone-cord strangling performed through a closed door. Death, it seems, is always just around the corner, and can come from anywhere, delivered via crop-sprayer or helicopter blades, sheets of falling glass, coffee pots, chainsaws, grenade launchers and even female thighs (Xenia Onatopp crushes her lovers in GoldenEye). It’s a macho world where women are generally sidelined into a handful of thankless roles — handwringing girlfriend, nightclub singer, tart, bad girl. But they do get the good lines. “You’re not too smart, are you?” Kathleen Turner points out in Body Heat, “I like that in a man.” The line is flipped by the barfly Bruce Campbell in Crimewave. “I haven’t seen you in here before,” he smarms, “I like that in a woman.”

Anyone new to the genre should head for the big three, Alfred Hitchcock, the Coen brothers and Martin Scorsese. Hitchcock loves the mechanics of suspense, and makes us hope that the bad guys will get away with it — the gay couple pulling off a perfect murder in the nine-take Rope; Ray Milland tricking a colleague into strangling his wife in Dial M for Murder; killers swapping each others’ victims in Strangers on a Train; the kleptomaniac Marnie robbing her employers. He is interested in the women, too, not just as icy blondes but also as controlling mothers, in North by Northwest, Psycho and Saboteur.

Scorsese skips that problem by doing away with women altogether, but he makes up for it with the sheer edginess of his bad guys. “I’m funny, how?” the psychotically touchy Joe Pesci asks a laughing Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, “I’m a clown, I amuse you?” And we hold our breath, knowing that Pesci will either shoot him in the foot or let the moment pass. Robert De Niro is clearly Scorsese’s alter-ego, the brooding man of the streets that the director could never be. Al Pacino does the same for Brian De Palma in Carlito’s Way and Scarface, and it’s true that the best crime actors play archetypes.

For many, Heat, which brings together these two acting giants, is a pinnacle. Michael Mann’s epic about an obsessive cop and his nemesis unfolds against a sinister, glittering Los Angeles, but keeps De Niro and Pacino apart for much of its running time, finally converging them not in a disused warehouse or at the docks (painfully overused crime locations) but in an ordinary coffee shop.

The Coen brothers perfected the satisfying crime thriller early in their careers with Blood Simple, a film that manages to stick to the rules while inverting them. The Coens understand how crucial it is for the audience to know more than the players, so when an incriminating cigarette lighter is left at a crime scene, we’re virtually screaming at the screen, “Pick it up, you idiot!” They’re not afraid of tackling existential epiphanies either, as the double-crossing private dick M. Emmett Walsh is left to die on a bathroom floor, knowing that the last sight in his grubby life will be the underside of a sink.

Nor is it only about shoot-outs. There is also the caper movie, in which wonderfully ingenious robberies slide into panicky disaster. As a child I remember admiring the crooks of Rififi, who cut a hole in a ceiling and stuck an umbrella through to catch the pieces. It was a long time before Tom Cruise’s absurd acrobatics in Mission Impossible. The Vegas caper, the bank job, the prison break and the cat burglary can all be played for laughs.

The original Italian Job still trounces Ocean’s Eleven, least of all because its unlikely cast incorporates the talents of both Noël Coward and Benny Hill. Who’s Minding the Mint? provides a victimless crime, as a treasury worker accidentally minces thousands of dollars in his garbage disposal unit, and is forced to recruit a team of spectacularly hopeless crooks to print off replacement cash. It’s the kind of plot that’s still in service today in films such as Welcome to Colinwood.

French cinema offers plenty of gems, such as Les Diaboliques, Tell No One, Nikita and Léon. A personal favourite is L’Homme du Train, in which a cool hitman and a retired teacher yearn for each other’s lives. It’s probably the only crime film in which the key scene involves a nice pair of slippers. In any Top Ten list you’ll find Bonnie & Clyde, The Godfather, The French Connection and Chinatown. Modern thrillers are more complex but less memorably perfect than dramas that were black and white in every sense. With so many past gems surfacing on DVD, missing them would be a crime.

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