But with a woman's options being limited in the years before the war, audiences at the time knew she'd go along. So she can't be forced to testify against him, Pinkie will marry Rose, though sex repulses him - as does she, really.

'I like a girl who's friendly,' he tells her.

When he learns a pretty waitress named Rose (Carol Marsh) could incriminate him, he sweet-talks her. Playing Pinkie, a violent 17-year-old gangster, was a baby-faced Richard Attenborough, the same guy who would later direct such emotionally resonant films as Gandhi and Cry Freedom, but who here was playing an out-and-out psychopath, chatting with his gangster buddies as he absent-mindedly yanked out a doll's hair, strand by strand.Įarly on, Pinkie kills someone and spends the remainder of the film trying to cover his tracks. Plenty colorful, in other words - fitting for a story set in a British resort town just before World War II. The 1947 Brighton Rock was black and white, based on a novel by Graham Greene about characters named Pinkie Brown and Rose. This week's remake - of a British gangster film called Brighton Rock - is sufficiently reworked that it's worth looking at the old and the new, side by side. With Conan the Barbarian already open, there'll soon be fresh versions of Straw Dogs, The Three Musketeers and even television's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. We've been through a summer of movie sequels now comes a fall of movie remakes.

Brighton rock book cover