Stuff of Legend: film captures Kray twins' pomp and menace

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/04/stuff-of-legend-film-captures-kray-twins-pomp-and-menace

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Nothing would have made Ronnie and Reggie Kray happier than to have been the subject of a film with the majestic title of Legend. Over the many years they spent behind bars since being jailed for life in 1969, they often pondered who they would like to play their parts when the inevitable movie was made. Richard Burton, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Bob Hoskins were just some of the many names that they helpfully came up with for any potential casting director.

Less respectful bank robbers of the era suggested the wonderful comic actor Bernard Bresslaw would have made a great Ronnie, but if the twins are looking down from the great maximum security wing in the sky, they would surely be deeply gratified that they – both of ’em – have been portrayed so brilliantly and charismatically by Tom Hardy.

Films about real life criminals face two major tests. Are they broadly accurate and do they glamourise dirty deeds? On the first count, the writer and director Brian Helgeland has been able to rely on the work and advice of John Pearson, who was recruited by the twins to write their biography in the 1960s and whose book, The Profession of Violence, remains the definitive account of their lives. This means that many of the telling details of their krayziness are slipped subtly into the narrative.

So when Reggie offers a cigarette to an unwary soul who has offended him, we know that he is about to whack him with his famed cigarette punch – a fag in the mouth made a jaw looser and easier to break. When we hear the wartime tones of Winston Churchill booming out of a wood, we know that we will soon see the deranged Ronnie, who was obsessed with both Churchill and Gordon of Khartoum and played recordings of the former’s famous speeches at times of stress.

It would be impossible in two hours and eleven minutes to cover the entire lives of the twins from war-time childhood, army desertion and boxing success through the years of their violent sway in east London – club ownership, long firm frauds, murders and Old Bailey trial – and on to their declining years in Parkhurst and Broadmoor and their lavish East End funerals. So Helgeland has concentrated very much on what they would regard as their pomp, when they were most powerful and most feared.

A more modest version of their lives, the 1990 film The Krays starring Gary and Martin Kemp, put the twins’ doting and imposing mother Violet centre stage. Here the lead female role and that of narrator goes, perhaps surprisingly, to poor Frances Shea – played by Emily Browning – the vulnerable young woman Reggie wooed and wed, but whose brief married life was a nightmare which ended in suicide . Her family are apparently less than happy with her portrayal in the film.

Violet barely features in Legend, apart from providing a nice slice of cake for her boys. Nor is there any sign of Frank “the Mad Axeman” Mitchell, whose escape from Dartmoor the twins arranged and whose subsequent murder they organised after he became a troublesome nuisance.

The set pieces of the twins’ baleful career are dealt with briskly and pretty accurately: the shooting of George Cornell in the Blind Beggar, the fatal stabbing of Jack “the Hat” McVitie – a great performance from Sam Spruell – and their controversial relationship, through the world of rough trade, with the Tory peer Lord Boothby and the Labour MP Tom Driberg. Harold Wilson even gets a walk on part. Incidentally, the part of the Blind Beggar is played by the Royal Oak on Columbia Road in Shoreditch, where currently the only serious shooting that takes place is carried out by film crews.

And the glamour? Well, Reggie is introduced right at the start of the film as “the gangster prince of the East End” and the honest copper pursuing them is “the heavy-footed” Nipper Read, played by Christopher Eccleston. Helgeland does not, however, shy away from the twins’ brutal, sadistic nature or their daft plans for expansion into Africa – even though they could barely handle Esmeralda’s Barn, the gaming club in Knightsbridge that is the scene for a fight that provides the film’s “how-did-they-do-that?” moment.

As one would expect from the man who wrote the screenplay for LA Confidential, Helgeland has captured the era pretty well. But it is Tom Hardy’s mesmerising performance – or should that be performances? – that makes the film. The Krays’ old associates, who helped Helgeland with his research and have now seen the finished version, have been particularly impressed by the way Hardy has captured the weird mixture of menace, madness and politeness that was Ronnie Kray.

For those who can’t quite get enough of the twins, there is a economy version of their tale, The Rise of the Krays directed by Zachary Adler, which has been launched as a DVD in Legend’s slipstream. It has bucket-loads of blood, some sturdy performances from the main characters and dialogue such as “a little birdie told me you lot got unfinished business with me and my brother, Reg”. It looks like the film business will never be quite finished with the brothers.