Few reviewers of the time cottoned to the film’s blend of the cool and the lofty. Contemporary critics, in comparison, would appreciate such offspring of The Hit as Gangster No. 1, Sexy Beast, and In Bruges, and the stateside equivalents made by the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino.
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The Hit was written by Peter Prince, who’d worked with Frears on four TV dramas. The nominal protagonist is Willie Parker (Terence Stamp), who, at the outset, squeals on four of his fellow robbers. Flash-forward ten years, and his tranquil life in southern Spain ends with the arrival of the gangland killer Braddock (John Hurt) and his rookie partner, Myron (Tim Roth).
They abduct Willie and head for Paris, where he’ll be read his last rites by Corrigan, the leader of the men he betrayed. Corrigan makes one brief, silent appearance in The Hit, but his glower haunts it he was played by Lennie Peters, the blind seventies pop star who reputedly knew Ronnie and Reggie Kray, notorious kingpins of the London underworld. The film was inspired by the true story of “Bertie” Smalls, an armed robber who had informed on thirty-two of his associates after striking a deal with the Director of Public Prosecutions that guaranteed his immunity. It was the first deal of its kind and made Smalls the first official “supergrass.” When he gave evidence in court in 1974, the men he informed against sardonically sang the wartime song “We’ll Meet Again,” a moment re-created in The Hit.
While on the lam, Smalls had stayed in Torremolinos. He was ahead of his time: so many British villains at large migrated to the Costa del Sol following the collapse of the extradition treaty between Spain and the U.K. in 1978 that it became known as the Costa del Crime. Frears turns this fish-out-of-water phenomenon of nouveau riche cockney gangsters seeking Shangri-la in Andalusia into a moral fable fraught with fatalism, an idea that clearly fascinated Jeremy Thomas, the film’s producer. Sixteen years later, he and director Jonathan Glazer made Sexy Beast, in which the good life enjoyed by retired safecracker Gal (Ray Winstone) on the Costa del Sol is rocked by the psychotic Logan (Ben Kingsley), sent by his boss to bring Gal to London for a heist. Sexy Beast also drew from Out of the Past all three films channel the return of the repressed.Ī handful of films have mythicized British gangland since its sixties heyday. Michael Caine famously told Bob Hoskins, “There are three good British gangster films. I was in one, you were in one, and we were both in the other. ” On a different plane, Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance deconstructed the genre by sending its Ronnie Kray–like protagonist (James Fox) to the Chelsea refuge of a rock star (Mick Jagger), where class and sexual boundaries evaporate. The Hit subverted it in other ways, removing its villains to another alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as Braddock and Myron ferry Willie along the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains. The film begins with a spiky Eric Clapton solo, ushering in an ominous slow-motion shot of a man in an off-white suit walking across a summit Paco de Lucía’s flamenco soundtrack cranks up the dread throughout. The man, Braddock, looks at the breathtaking view, but does he see it? As he stands beside a hilltop marker on a cairn-death with a cherry on top-the frame freezes. Its recurrence throws a loop around the story, bringing the characters to the point where they must confront mortality.Įditor Mick Audsley, a regular Frears collaborator, borrowed this ominous image from a later scene when Braddock must make a life-or-death decision.
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