The Hit: Frears's Philosophical Road-Trip Crime Film

Most crime films treat a car journey as dead time, the connective tissue between the bits with guns in them. Stephen Frears’s The Hit is a crime film in which the car journey is the entire picture. Two professionals are driving a man across Spain to be killed in Paris. The man they are driving will not stop talking, will not be frightened, and will not hand over the one commodity their trade actually runs on. Released in 1984 to almost no business, it remains the most interesting thing anyone made about contract killing in that decade.

The prologue is one of the great openings in British cinema, and it costs the film about four minutes. Willie Parker (Terence Stamp) gives evidence in a London court against the firm he worked for. The men in the dock watch him do it. As he is walked out under police protection, they begin, quietly and then together, to sing “We’ll Meet Again”. It is a threat delivered as a music-hall singalong, and it establishes the film’s whole tonal register before a single shot has been fired: this world is polite, patient and absolutely certain of itself.

Ten years pass in a title card. Willie is living in a white house in a hill village in Spain, resettled, sunburnt, apparently content. Then men come up the road for him, and he goes with them without a struggle, because he has been expecting them since the day he opened his mouth.

The professionals arrive

The men who collect him are Braddock (John Hurt) and Myron (Tim Roth). Braddock is a London operator of the old school, dressed for a business meeting in forty degrees of heat, economical to the point of muteness. Myron is his driver and apprentice, young, twitchy, keen, and out of his depth in ways he has not yet noticed. Their instructions are to deliver Willie to Paris, alive, to the people he informed on. The killing is meant to happen there, in front of an audience. The whole film is the drive.

What derails it is that Willie is delighted to see them. He is friendly. He is helpful about routes. He compliments the car. He explains, without any apparent strain, that he has spent a decade making his peace with exactly this and that dying does not trouble him. Peter Prince’s screenplay never lets us settle the question of whether this is genuine philosophy or the most sophisticated survival tactic in the film, and Frears is disciplined enough to leave it unsettled for ninety minutes.

Braddock’s problem is professional. A hitman’s work depends on fear — fear is what makes people compliant, quiet, and easy to move across a border. A man who is not afraid is not a package. He is a passenger with opinions. Hurt plays Braddock’s mounting irritation almost entirely below the surface, in the set of his jaw and the length of his silences, and it is a masterclass in playing a man who cannot admit what is happening to him.

Frears in the sun

The Hit was Frears’s second cinema feature, arriving thirteen years after Gumshoe (1971). He had spent the intervening decade doing distinguished work in British television, and the film has the confidence of a director who has directed a great deal without needing anyone to notice. A year later My Beautiful Laundrette made him internationally famous, and The Hit was promptly filed as a curiosity from before the interesting part. That verdict has aged badly.

The craft decision that makes the film is the light. Mike Molloy shot it on location in Spain in hard, high, unforgiving sun — dry plains, white villages, empty roads, a landscape with nowhere to hide anything. British crime cinema at that point ran on rain, sodium light and interiors; the genre’s entire visual grammar assumed shadow. Frears removed the shadow. Everything in The Hit happens in plain view, in blinding daylight, on roads visible for ten miles in either direction. It has the effect of stripping the men of their mystique. In a London basement, Braddock would be a figure of dread. On a Spanish plain at midday, he is a man in an unsuitable suit standing next to a car, and the film keeps quietly noticing this.

The music pulls the same trick from the other direction. The title piece is a flamenco guitar theme by Paco de Lucía, with Eric Clapton also credited on the score, and it gives the film a lyrical, travelling, almost holiday quality that sits at a deliberate angle to the errand being run. The soundtrack keeps promising a road movie. The plot keeps remembering it is a killing.

Roth, and the third man in the car

Tim Roth’s Myron is the film’s destabiliser and its cinema debut for an actor who had come out of Alan Clarke’s television work. Myron wants to be Braddock. He has no idea what Braddock actually is. He talks when he should not, he mishandles a job in Madrid, and the consequence of that mishandling puts a fourth person in the car: Maggie (Laura del Sol), a young woman who has seen too much to be left behind and whom nobody in the vehicle has any plan for.

She is the film’s sharpest structural idea. Braddock’s operation was designed for one prisoner and two men. Add a bored apprentice and an unwilling witness, and the machine starts producing outcomes nobody selected. Meanwhile Fernando Rey, magisterially unhurried as a Spanish police inspector, is working out from a distance that something is crossing his country. The film’s tension never comes from a chase. It comes from arithmetic — four people, one car, one destination, and a job specification that assumed two of those variables.

The real ancestor

The obvious lineage for a becalmed, philosophical hitman runs through Jean-Pierre Melville, and The Hit certainly knows Le Samouraï. But the truer ancestor is Irving Lerner’s Murder by Contract (1958), the film that first insisted a hitman is a man with a method and a worldview and that both can be talked out of him. Watch Murder by Contract and then The Hit, and the family resemblance is unmistakable: the killer who has thought about it too much, the job that stalls because reality declines to behave like the theory.

Its descendant is far easier to name, and it is standing right there. Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast takes the identical premise — an English criminal retired to the Spanish sun, visited by an emissary from a London firm that has not forgotten him — and plays it at maximum volume where Frears played it at a murmur. Glazer’s film is the more famous one. Frears got there sixteen years earlier and was funnier about it. Set against the cold northern austerity of Get Carter, The Hit looks like the same genre translated into a language with no word for gloom.

A verdict, argued

The Hit is unusually easy to undersell, because everything it does well it does without raising its voice. The plotting is thin by design. The action is scarce. Nobody has an arc in the workshop sense. What it has instead is an argument, sustained for ninety minutes and paid off exactly: that the professional’s power over you runs on your terror rather than on the gun, and that a man who genuinely relinquishes the terror has taken something from the professional which cannot be shot back out of him.

The film then does the honest thing with that argument, which is where its real quality lives, and which belongs below the line. What can be said above it is that Frears refuses to let Willie’s serenity be simply admirable and refuses to let Braddock’s competence be simply frightening. Both men are running a performance. Only one of them knows it.

The case against the film deserves airing, because it is the reason The Hit spent twenty years out of print. It is thin. Ninety minutes of men in a car talking is a structure with very little tolerance for a weak passage, and the Madrid section sags. Maggie is a function rather than a character — Laura del Sol is asked to be a catalyst and a moral witness with about eleven lines to do it in, and the film’s disinterest in her interior life is a real limitation rather than a stylistic choice. And Willie’s philosophising, if you are unsympathetic, reads as a screenwriter enjoying himself: nobody talks in aphorisms for six hundred miles. Each of these complaints is true. None of them survives contact with the last ten minutes.

Stamp is extraordinary here, and the role arrived at exactly the right moment in a career that had gone quiet after the 1960s made him a face. He plays Willie with an almost priestly gentleness that curdles, on inspection, into something much less settled. Hurt gives one of his most disciplined performances, all withheld. Roth announces himself in about three scenes.

It is available in a good restored transfer through Criterion, which rescued it from decades of British television scheduling, and it deserves the attention a proper presentation asks of you. Watch it in daylight. The film would prefer it.

Spoilers below

Stop here if you have not seen it — the ending is the argument, and the argument is the film.

The composure does not hold. When the moment arrives and Willie understands that it is arriving now, in this place, with no more road left to fill with talk, the philosophy comes off him like a coat. He runs. He pleads. Ten years of preparation buy him nothing at all, and Frears films the collapse without a shred of mockery, which is what makes it devastating rather than merely ironic. The film has spent ninety minutes letting us believe a man can think his way out of dying, and then it shows us the exact second the thinking stops working.

Braddock’s fate is the film’s second joke and its better one. He has been the only competent person on screen throughout, the one professional in a car full of amateurs, and his competence turns out to be worth precisely as much as Willie’s serenity. The job never had a good ending in it. Everyone in that car was performing certainty at everyone else, all the way across Spain, and the road simply ran out.