Johnny Bannion is a career criminal with an entourage of minor criminals and fast girls. After being paroled from a three-year stint in prison, he begins planning his "comeback" - a racetrack heist for £40,000. He successfully plans and executes the robbery with the help of his partner, a well-connected American named Mike Carter (Sam Wanamaker). Unbeknownst to him, the racetrack is owned by another gangster. Word is spread of his responsibility, he's double-crossed by his associates, and he is sent back to prison, where he is a well known figure.
In prison, Italian mob boss Frank Saffron takes him under his wing and secures a move to a different block through claiming to be a Roman Catholic. He tells him the outside world wants their £40,000 back, but is prepared to give favours if he gets a cut. They make their plans whispering to each other during Sunday mass.
The death of an inmate triggers a prison riot. The other prison boss, the Irish O'Hara, is less sympathetic to Bannion. During the riot, Bannion opens the door to let the guards back in and wins favour of the prison governor. He is transferred to a low security prison for his assistance but is booed by fellow inmates as he leaves.
During the transfer, it is revealed that Bannion paid £40,000 for the riot and a "fast car". The car appears and drives the prison van off the road, rescuing Bannion. However, he has been double crossed. He is taken to a narrow boat where the criminals he robbed are waiting, also with his lover Suzanne as security. They flee, but Bannion is hit by a bullet as they escape. They reach a snowy field where Johnny shoots one of his three pursuers before being shot himself. He dies before being able to say where the money is.[6]
Joseph Losey said he was handed a ready-made script. "It was a concoction of all the prison films Hollywood ever made", he said. "Both Stanley Baker and I refused to work until they let us write our own script. Which is what we did."[7] He says the producers wanted a sequence where the criminals rob a race track but he felt that had been done in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956), so he filmed it taking place off screen. According to Losey, Johnny Bannion was modelled on real-life Soho gangster Albert Dimes, whom Baker was acquainted with.[8] Frank Saffron, the prison mob boss, was patterned after Charles Sabini.
The film premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, August 28, 1960. It had a limited release in the United States, May 1962, but was “not shown at a major New York theatre.”[9]
Reception
According to Losey the film was a commercial success. He said the film was banned in Ireland because so many of the prisoners were Irish Catholics.[7][10]
The film was reportedly very successful in Paris.[4]
Retrospective appraisal
Characterizing the film’s style as “vital and vulgar as ever,” critic Dan Callahan at Senses of Cinema offers this measured praise:
Losey’s command of atmosphere and his ability to build tension are outstanding here…The bursts of violence in The Criminal are orgasmic in their surety, in their explosive feeling of energy at last unleashed. Some scenes spill over the top, making an unconvincing mess, yet mournful soundtrack jazz and winter landscapes signal a darkening of Losey’s consciousness.[11][12]
Theme
Film historian Foster Hirsch describes the film as “a naturalistic study of the way the environment both creates and entraps a criminal mentality.[13]
Losey presents three major settings in the film: the penitentiary; Bannion’s apartment after his parole; and a desolate winter landscape where he’s hidden the heist money. None of these offer a refuge for the criminal. The first two domains appear as equivalents: the prison is merely the obverse of society at large, both of which impose repressive social hierarchies and inequities.[14] The visual contrast of the final setting - a snow-covered countryside field - proves fatal:
[T]he whiteness of the landscape contains its own terror; it too is a threatening rather than nurturing environment, and it is here, against the icy, impersonal whiteness, that the criminal is killed.[15]
Footnotes
^Caute, David (1994). Joseph Losey. Oxford University Press. p. 139.
^ abEUGENE ARCHER (15 March 1964). "EXPATRIATE RETRACES HIS STEPS: Joseph Losey Changes Direction With His British 'Servant'". New York Times. p. X9.
^Hirsch, 1980 p. 76: “...a B movie prison melodrama redeemed by Losey’s skillful mise-en-scene.”
^Hirsch, 1980 p. 76: “Brooding, hulking, shrewd, Bannion conforms to a stereotyped concept of a B-move hood. He knows how to survive in a concrete jungle of the underworld both in and out of prison.”
^ ab"FILM CRAFT: Joseph Losey talks to Peter Lennon". The Guardian. London. 9 July 1962. p. 5.
