L'età della violenza

The Good Die Young is a cracking British Noir picture directed by Lewis Gilbert and featuring a strong cast of British and American actors. Laurence Harvey, Stanley Baker, Richard Basehart, John Ireland, Gloria Grahame, Margaret Leighton, Joan Collins and Rene Ray are the principals. While support comes from Robert Morley and Freda Jackson.

Adapted from the novel written by Richard MacAuley, the story starts with four men pulling up in a car, guns are passed around them and it's soon evident they are about to commit a serious crime. We are then taken through the sequences for each man, how they came to be at that point in time, what brought them together and their common interest; that of women trouble and financial strife. It's excellently structured by Gilbert, four separate stories, yet all of them are on the same track and heading towards the grim and potently "noirish" final quarter. Such is the way that we as viewers have been fully informed about our characters, the impact when things get violent is doubly strong. It takes you by surprise at first because the makers have given us a smooth set-up, and then there is the shock factor because these were not criminal men at the outset. But then..

A real pleasant surprise to this particular viewer was The Good Die Young, it's got fully formed characters within a tight and interesting story. The cast do fine work, yes one could probably complain a touch that the ladies are under written, but they each get in and flesh out the downward spiral of the male protagonists. Rene Ray is particularly impressive as the fraught wife of Stanley Baker's injured boxer, Mike, while Gloria Grahame (walking like a panther) is memorable as a bitch-a-like babe driving her husband Eddie (Ireland) to distraction. Basehart is his usual value for money self, but it's Baker and Harvey who own the picture. Baker does a great line in raw emotion, a big man, big heart and a big conscious; his journey is the films emotional axis, while Harvey is positively weasel like as playboy sponger Miles Ravenscourt; someone who is guaranteed to have you hissing at the screen with his stiffness perfectly befitting the character.

Top stuff. 8/10

An attempt by the British to make a noirish thriller in the American style and it almost pays off. It's strong on atmosphere, with some superb nighttime photography, and it has an outstanding cast even if some of them are not at their best. It's both an heist movie and a character study that delves into the lives and backgrounds of the criminals on the job, by way of flashbacks.

They are Laurence Harvey, Stanley Baker, (both very good), Richard Basehart and John Ireland, (less so), and their women include a young and highly inadequate Joan Collins, Gloria Grahame, (winging it), and a marvelous Margaret Leighton who plays the woman who is married to Harvey and who keeps him and who was also married to him in real life.

The serviceable Lewis Gilbert directs with real flair. Gilbert never made the front ranks yet many of his films were surprisingly entertaining and well-made. This is one of them.

Four men are in a car. They are all from different walks of life and a short time ago none of them were nothing more than drinking buddies – now they are on their way somewhere with a box full of guns. A washed up boxer, a man trying to win his wife back from a controlling mother, an RAF officer with a cheating wife and a "gentleman" with no means of his own. Only a few weeks ago, "gentleman" Miles finds himself out of luck with his women and his money pit in-laws and, needing money so, when he meets the other three men, he sees a chance to take advance of their various needs.

For a while back in the fifties, British cinema seemed to have enough grit and clout to it to almost be able to compete with the American market in regards crime thrillers (if not quite noirs); The Good Die Young is one of those that has a good try and is a pretty enjoyable piece even if it lacks the grit and tension of similar American products. The film opens with an intriguing set up but then jumps back to establish the story and characters and it is here where it becomes weak. The back stories are rather melodramatic and it doesn't fit well with what was meant to be a bit tougher and gripping; they are interesting enough to do the job but I must admit to feeling that they were a bit dragged out and unnecessarily long. However, if you make it through this main body of the film you'll get to an ending that is just what the film should have been throughout. I won't spoil it but it is enjoyably brutal, downbeat and gripping – "about time" was my thought when I realised that the film had gotten going.

The cast do their best with the melodrama but the material isn't there for them and they are mixed. Harvey and Baker stand out with strong performances; Basehart is good but Ireland feels like he is just making up the numbers. Naturally Collins stands out today, and she is quite good but the melodrama is made better by Grahame, Ray and, to a lesser extent, Leighton. Of course the men are all much better in the proper crime side of the film and this is partly due to better and more atmospheric direction from writer/director Gilbert, who also injects the pace when it is required.

Overall this is an average film mainly because the back story takes up far too much of the film, is too melodramatic and doesn't sit well with the tough tension promised in the first scene and delivered at the end. With the main trunk being rather plodding, the ending does feel a lot better mainly because you're grateful that the film has gotten going. Could have been great but is merely reasonably good; worth seeing for genre and period fans but will not impress a wider audience.

The Good Die Young comes at you from the very beginning; a honking, blaring opening consisting of the front of a car filling the screen. We appear to be on the back of the vehicle in front, that sensation of being chased through the dimly lit public streets in the dead of night most certainly prominent. British director Lewis Gilbert begins his 1954 heist film in a stark and unmitigated fashion, that sense of having something you don't want right on your tail or looming over you as you attempt to get away; his film going on to document a handful of characters as disparate as they are desperate with a foreboding sense of the inevitable looming over each of their heads as they ponder a heist set against each of their respective financial situations. But where the opening is frank in its immediacy, The Good Die Young goes on to morph into a rather intimate character study about a handful of men brought together through the same reason to take part in the same task.

The film is ultimately about the allure of crime than anything else; those expecting a gangster film will be rather sorely disappointed, with Gilbert's film coming to resemble more a class drama than a crime genre piece. It's bookended by the men clustered together with tensions running high and a sorely undesired predicament looming, a clerk named Joe Halsey (Basehart) narrating to us how it was he and three others got to be occupying a rich playboy's car sizing up an object and wielding pistols; the finale a quite gripping trawl through the murky, cobbled streets of 1950s Britain as police officers; stray freight trains and unfaithful partners in crime each pose their own threats. It's here Gilbert proves he's just as apt at dealing with dramatic action set-pieces as he is engaging us with character: specifically, who's involved; what's at stake; who's going where, and why; the internal 'checkpoints' the characters must reach as well as the sorts of action that must be undertaken, the man having his characters in The Good Die Young pay special attention to both the methodical planning and dealing with each obstacle within an action set piece which needs separately dealing with during the final getaway.

Gilbert executed similarly effective craft later on in his career, namely when he was granted the helming of three separate films within the James Bond cannon. 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me saw an extended scene on board a tanker ship nearer said film's climax and required its lead to first get aboard; find some trapped hostages; recover them only to discover a wall of seemingly impregnable steel; find something which might destroy that; obtain it, and then follow through once again with the next course of action. The attention to such things were initially used to a lesser degree of success in 1967's You Only Live Twice. But in The Good Die Young, a similarly effective craft is evident behind not only the finale but the getting to this point; the film coming to resemble one long flashback told to us by the aforementioned Joe involving a whole group of people brought together through problems with money.

The film does its best to intrinsically link each man, each one being of a respective background in class and career; one of whom is a boxer named Mike Morgan (Baker), a man at the end of his stretch as a fighter - the ring-set howls and wails as another fatal blow is landed upon a poor opponent much to the glee of the crowd echoing down below into the locked room as Mike sits there knowing one of his hands is on the brink of being seriously damaged as it is. Meanwhile, American pilot Eddie Blain (Ireland) refuses orders to ship out to West Germany with the American air force to instead zero in on his wife and her infidelities; whereas narrator Joe maintains a rocky relationship with the mother of his own wife, something he gets involved in so much so that flying back to England from his American-based clerical job to get involved sees him fired.

So each man is rather attuned to their wives, Mike's relationship seeing him admit to lending his hard-earned cash to his own wife's brother if she'd told him to; his ultimate goal to take his large earnings and escape to his beloved. Furthermore, each man's respective situation in each of their jobs sees them hit a proverbial wall bringing about unemployment or redundancy; each of the three men additionally appearing to have served in a respective war and two of them have experiences with near-death or great harm of some kind in that Joe's mother in law attempts suicide and Mike must come to have some serious work done on his hand.

The men are eventually thrust together by the seemingly indomitable Miles Ravenscourt (Harvey), a young man, whom might be richer than he actually is, but whom occupies a plush and far richer locale; a self indulgent man whose home is rife with portraits of himself and whose wife Eve (Leighton) must suffer his begging for more money despite both parties' knowledge of his trouble with gambling debts; a man so estranged from his father, that he hopes to outlive him so that Miles may never see any of his inheritance, such is is ill-minded way with money as the film will go on to document. As previously mentioned, the film is more about the allure of crime or the idea behind a criminal act that'll greatly benefit oneself arriving with a sense of enticement, than most others things. The duality in each of the four men may appear looser than desired, but Gilbert crafts rather-a taut and tight heist film about desperate people doing desperate things at desperate times.

To understand the impact one particular quote from this movie had on me, you need to know that I first saw it at an 'Astra' cinema in the 1950s, while serving in the RAF.

In a scene early on in the film, John Ireland, a sergeant in the USAF, is accusing his wife, played by Gloria Grahame, of infidelity. She turns to him with self-righteous indignation and says (as only she can) :"Eddie, your time in the Air Force has coarsened your mind."

It shouldn't be difficult to imagine how, in front of an audience comprising a couple of hundred airmen, that one line brought the house down!

That apart, this is quite a decent crime caper movie, with some similarities to The League of Gentlemen (1959), but without the humorous touches.The only blemish is the usual wooden performance from Laurence Harvey. (How on earth did that man get so many leading roles in both British and American productions?)

Harvey apart, the acting is of a high standard. Stanley Baker is particularly impressive as the broken down prizefighter and Richard Basehart and John Ireland (the two token Yanks in British minor movies of the fifties) give excellent support as the other two conspirators. The young Joan Collins is ravishing as the wife any man would rob a dozen banks for and Freda Jackson is outstanding as her manipulating witch of a mother. Gloria Grahame is (of course) brilliant as the femme fatale and there is a delightful cameo from Robert Morley as the villain's father.