Villain (1971)

Richard Burton’s contribution to the London-gangland genre might look as if it’s mainly of historical interest now, with its dated dialogue, rather fake looking violence, and a bad-lad cockney accent from Burton that just doesn’t work. Superseded in scary nastiness many times over since it was made, it stands denuded of any power to still shock us; happily, its being denuded lets us get a better look at it, and what it really has to offer a brave punter. Released in a whole year of dark violent fantasies on the screen (among others: Dirty Harry, The French Connection, Shaft, Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, Wake In Fright, The Devils, Duel - all 1971), Villain feels like it’s not quite part of that psycho-drama moment, but something more grounded and socially astute.

Burton plays Vic, an East End gangster who can’t resist branching out to try something new and risky for his gang, namely, their first armed robbery. For the most part, the plot alternates between the crooks (a gormless pack of aggro losers) and the police detectives committed to bringing Vic down (bullying and mocking with impunity but noticeably free of any hint of corruption). The cops are a duo with one indivisible purpose – between the archly knowing, posh Inspector Matthews and his bluff scouser sidekick, there is no class or regional division, only a seamless integration into the law’s strong arm. Within the gang, we do get some different personalities – one’s a creep who turns cowardly when faced with a robbery job (rightly as it turns out, since even another experienced gang-boss thinks the plan is pretty dodgy), one’s a comedy-sketch idiot, and one frankly just makes up the numbers.

Vic himself surprises us with his relative mildness, after the opening builds him up to be some unmatched monster. He’s not terrifying at all; in the scale of real-life and film villainy, he’s not really that bad. He’s ‘orrible, yes, but only about as much as you’d expect from any mediocre hardcase. His failure to stand out gives the title some shading – Vic is the villain, but as he unravels before us, we can see he’s not the demon he wants people to be scared of. He seems not much different to the rival gang-boss who collaborates with him on the robbery, the one who puts up a flimsy resistance until Vic swiftly and effortlessly talks him into playing his part.  Vic doesn’t say anything particularly persuasive here because he doesn’t have to, he’s talking to a version of himself – all he has to do is appeal to their love of at least the idea it will be a thrill, to convince themselves they’re “kings”, and the deal is done. This scene opens up a foreboding prospect of a thousand more Vics milling around, eagerly fucking the country up.

England’s fucked-upness, in fact, gradually emerges as the dominant theme here. Central to the plot is Donald Sinden’s sleazy, wretched MP, intimidated in an early moment by Vic in a public toilet (an innuendo of homosexual threat that becomes a lesson in where power lies) and later the politician succumbs to blackmail and provides Vic with an exculpatory alibi. And Sinden is only one in a gallery of Villain’s deftly sketched, minor English gargoyles, covering a range of national vices – the fatuously proud, stuffy snobbery of the casino manager, the bootlicking of the delusional snitch, the petty resentments of the bitter little factory clerk who helps on the inside job. This undercurrent of satire is helped along with a scattering of discordantly righteous opinions from the crooks: Vic’s offended disgust that an MP should be so malleable to him, his comment “hooligans” at a vandalised phone box, the gang’s outrage at a factory strike that throws off their robbery plans. The robbery itself turns out to be wonderfully chaotic and shambolic, a reasonably violent scene even by today’s standards, in both action and technique.

At times, the overall technique is iffy. When Vic kicks the shit out of a collaborator, the ludicrous expression on Burton’s face stands as an example of an acting risk that doesn’t pay off and which it was a little unkind to leave in the final cut. Joss Ackland, later the immortally repellent South African bad guy in Lethal Weapon 2, also lets the side down with his kid-in-a-playground death scene. Some aspects of the film, for better or worse, have not dated at all – notably, the nature of the tension between Vic and the solidly dutiful, calmly determined cops has not changed much in cinema over the decades, interchangeable with the cat-and-mouse between the FBI and Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street 42 years later – the only wobble is the moment when Vic is first arrested, where the dialogue seems a little too richly worked by the scriptwriters, trying to slip in a few thematic statements (fortunately played well by the cast).  

Along with that lies the ambivalent treatment of sexuality, in one sense refreshingly severed from the insipid and reactionary association of sexual-minority status with virtue. You can however see why associating it with the opposite might have got tiresome. Some passing attempts to draw a contrast between Vic and the cops give us his contempt for suburban complacency counterposed to a glimpse of the Inspector’s home life, the kind of mundane frustrations of family that Vic so disdains. But these are in retrospect only a set-up for the reveal of Vic’s homosexuality. After reproaching “nice Jewish boy” Wolf for his hedonistic behaviour – “bit sordid, Wolfie, bit sordid” – his gay desire emerges, twisted up with urges for violence, making the word “sordid” a fairly clearly intended irony about being gay. A sex-scene was filmed but cut, so the attitude here seems, perhaps deceptively, almost neutral, although obviously not endorsed compared to Wolf’s cosy affair with a toff girl, which gets Hollywood lighting and musical support. Another clue to the limits of the film’s liberal tolerance can be detected when Vic accepts “Super Fruit” flavoured sweets, and in the rather decrepit equation of queerness with doting on mother dearest.

In the end, it’s his attenuated, conflicted love for Wolf that stops him from making his escape, a self-betraying complicity between his illicit (and only recently legalised) desire and the triumph of law and order. The complicity seems foreseen by the police (almost infallible in this film except for their temporary setback when they’re briefly defeated by corruption from above) as the detectives leer at Wolf that they know he’s “a very good friend” of the gangster. Wolf’s essential role in the final curtain – when the villain is outwitted in a trap that even Wolf sees through – has already been foreshadowed in the embarrassing moment when Vic pleads “Don’t leave me!” while standing over the bisexual boyfriend he has just jealously assaulted. It’s a great moment – a raw exposure of his neediness and self-pity. After that, the last remnant of his aura of menace is gone. When Vic turns back for his man at the crucial moment of escape and promptly gets caught, it triggers his film-ending monologue of doomed peacock defiance, or maybe queenly pique; oddly, a forerunner to the “King Kong” rant in Training Day.

Villain does not now look like a remotely plausible or insightful portrait of the London crime world or its Kray-esque figures. Crime movies have come along too far since, or not even “since” - in fact, not only would this film be tame by the end of the year, it had already been eclipsed two months before it even reached cinemas when the release of a historic watershed in the British crime genre knocked Villain into an instant obsolescence. Hanging over this film is, of course, the shadow of Get Carter. Although the sensibility offered here is dark-ish, Michael Tuchner’s smooth style remains tethered to the late 60s of British film-making that had just been left far behind by Mike Hodges’ unnaturally assured debut, which by contrast remains inextricably 70s in its cool stylistic power, cinematic inventiveness and unfettered hellish nihilism. In Burton’s dialogue, an almost shy use of cockney vulgarity (or diluted approximations of it – “you festering pig”?) sounds very thin compared to Michael Caine’s dauntingly successful projection of serpentine malice without any swearing stronger than “bloody”. One film was forced to tail another that, as it turned out, would never be surpassed.

But Carter is just Carter, an inhuman force, the remorseless nemesis of Point Blank concentrated to an even sharper, narrower point that seems to belong to the id more than to the world. What Villain projects, by contrast, is a whole spectrum of specifically English crappiness that anyone can still recognise today: Vic is a puffed-up nobody who learned how to throw his weight around and, as we wade through this display of the crooked establishment with all its representatives in the assorted toerags of the ruling and middle classes, we can only feel that he speaks for his nation.