The Art of Crime

Intriguing snippet in the Guardian yesterday by Adam Dawtrey about British screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto. Mellis and Scinto wrote Gangster No 1, Sexy Beast and Ray Winstone's new film 44 Inch Chest.



The British - or in this case -London crime thriller is so overdone these days (well, for about a decade now) that I've rather ignored 44 Inch Chest. And I'd hated Gangster No 1 - a film that for all its slick sheen was as feral and ugly as Paul Bettany's lead character beneath his bespoke suit, although it did bring to mind something Brian De Palma once said about the British crime film, that they seemed to come straight from the schoolyard. I always assumed he meant in the way the arguments that escalate to horrific violence in so many of these movies are at heart ridiculous and infantile.
Sexy Beast, though, is one of the few British thrillers of the last couple of decades that does merit any attention. Not because of Ben Kingsley's over-the-top, over-praised, very actorly vision of psychosis (Ian McShane says much less but is much more convincing in his menace), but because of Winstone's astonishingly quiet performance at its heart as a gangster who's gone to Spain and softened, and for what I had always assumed was director Jonathan Glazer's visual nods to magic realism.
Maybe that's unfair on Mellis and Scinto. It seems they found inspiration for all three films in fine art. According to Mellis, "Gangster No 1 was originally influenced by Bacon, Sexy Beast was Hockney, 44 Inch Chest ws Magritte."
That's almost enough to make me want to see 44 Inch Chest just to see if it lives up to such a bid for high-art association.