The Krays: The Twin-Gangster Biopic

The obvious way to film the Kray twins is as a rise-and-fall — the sharp suits, the nightclub, the celebrity photographs, the hubris, the arrest. It is the shape the story has been told in for fifty years, in memoirs and documentaries and pub anecdote, and it is the shape that made Ronnie and Reggie Kray into folk property. Peter Medak’s 1990 film declines the shape entirely. It is a fairy tale about a mother and her boys, and the gangsterism is treated as something that happened in the garden while the important business went on indoors.

That decision belongs to Philip Ridley, who wrote it, and it explains everything odd about the film. Ridley is a novelist, playwright, painter and the director of The Reflecting Skin — a man with no discernible interest in procedural crime and a deep interest in the grotesque, the domestic and the mythic. Handed the most over-narrated story in British underworld history, he wrote a script in which the Krays are barely the subject.

Billie Whitelaw is the film

Violet Kray, as written by Ridley and played by Billie Whitelaw, is one of the great monsters of British cinema, and the film loves her without qualification. She is warm, funny, ferociously capable, and she has built for her sons a world in which they are perfect, blameless and enormous. Whitelaw — Samuel Beckett’s actress of choice for decades, which tells you exactly what register she can hold — plays Violet with total maternal sincerity. She never signals. She simply believes, and the twins are the direct output of that belief.

The film’s argument, laid out with no subtlety whatsoever and none needed, is that the Krays were made in a house of women. Violet, her sisters, the aunts and the nan occupy the film’s centre; they talk, decide, remember and rule. The men in this world are absent, weak, hiding from conscription, or dead. Ridley’s twins grow up as the only males permitted, worshipped from infancy, and they emerge into the East End with the unshakeable conviction that the world is an extension of their mother’s kitchen and will behave accordingly.

That is a real thesis about the Krays, and it is more interesting than the sharp-suits version, because it explains something the procedural account cannot: the childishness. The historical Krays’ violence had a tantrum quality, sudden and disproportionate and immediately followed by an expectation of tea. Ridley’s script locates the source.

The casting stunt that worked

Gary and Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet play Ronnie and Reggie. In 1990 this was received as a publicity manoeuvre, and it is easy to see why — two pop stars, no formal training, playing the most mythologised gangsters in the country. It works, for reasons that have little to do with acting technique.

The Kemps are brothers, and they carry the thing you cannot cast for: the physical shorthand of two men who have shared a room since birth. They stand too close. They finish each other’s business without consultation. When they are in a scene together, the room organises itself around a private unit that predates everyone else present. Gary Kemp’s Ronnie gets the showier half — the paranoia, the appetite, the openly declared homosexuality that the real Ronnie carried with a defiance remarkable for the period — while Martin Kemp plays Reggie as a man perpetually half a step behind his brother, trying to run a business inside a hurricane.

Neither performance is technically distinguished. Both are unsettling, which in this film is the requirement. The supporting cast does the heavy lifting: Steven Berkoff as George Cornell, Tom Bell as Jack “the Hat” McVitie, Kate Hardie as Frances, Reggie’s wife, and Susan Fleetwood as Violet’s sister Rose, who gets the film’s most frightening speech about what women in the East End are permitted to do with their anger.

The craft: a fairy tale that keeps its face straight

Medak shoots this as folklore. The colours are heightened, the compositions are formal, and Michael Kamen’s score is doing something much closer to a storybook than to a crime film. Ridley’s dialogue is stylised — nobody in the East End ever spoke like this — and the film simply refuses to apologise for it. Violet’s monologues are arias. The imagery of birds, cages and swans recurs with a directness that would be embarrassing in a naturalistic picture.

It helps to know who was holding the camera. Peter Medak is Hungarian, and he left Budapest as a teenager during the 1956 uprising — a man who had watched a real state do real violence before he ever filmed a pretend gangster. He arrived in Britain as an outsider and spent a career being fascinated by English pathology, most sharply in Let Him Have It the following year, which took the Derek Bentley case and filleted the country’s appetite for hanging a boy. Medak looks at the East End’s love affair with the Krays the way an anthropologist looks at a shrine: with attention, without belief, and with a persistent interest in why the worshippers need it so badly.

The gamble is that the mythic register is the honest register. The Krays were never a documentary subject by 1990; they had been a legend for twenty years, retailed by people with an interest in the retelling. A film that shot them in gritty vérité would be making a truth claim it could not support. Medak and Ridley instead shoot the legend as a legend, and by doing so they get at the actual material — the way an East End family talked itself into believing that two violent, frightened men were kings.

Where this strategy strains is on the violence. When the film’s two famous killings arrive, the fairy-tale grammar cracks, and the sudden ugliness is deliberate and effective. Some viewers find the tonal join clumsy. I think the join is the film’s best moment of nerve: the myth is running along beautifully, and then somebody actually dies, and the storybook cannot metabolise it.

The ethics problem

Ronnie and Reggie Kray were alive, imprisoned, and consulted during production. The film was made by Fugitive Features, and the twins’ involvement — and the money attached to it — has hung over its reputation ever since. This is the standing difficulty of the form, and it is worth being honest about: a film about real murderers, made with their cooperation, is buying its authenticity from people who benefit from the purchase. The wider genre problem is worth a longer argument in its own right.

To its credit, The Krays is not a laundering exercise. The twins are not made glamorous, sympathetic or competent; they are a pair of appalling, arrested boys. Ridley’s mythologising is aimed at explaining rather than excusing them, and the film’s affection is spent entirely on Violet, who was not a criminal. The victims, though, are thin — a genuine cost, and the standard complaint against this film, which I think is fair.

The real ancestor

Not the British gangster tradition. The real ancestor of The Krays is Raoul Walsh’s White Heat, the 1949 Cagney picture built on precisely this idea: that the gangster is a boy with a mother problem, that the mother is the only authority he recognises, and that the violence is a toddler’s rage in a man’s body. Cody Jarrett’s headaches and Ma Jarrett’s lap are the direct genetic material here, forty years earlier and considerably tighter.

The nearer relative in British cinema is Performance, which shares the pop-star casting, the interest in gangster identity as a costume, and the willingness to be weird about it. Against The Long Good Friday, which reads the underworld as an economy, The Krays looks almost perversely uninterested in crime as a business — and that is the point of it.

A verdict, argued

The Krays is a strange, uneven, genuinely ambitious film that has been condescended to for thirty-five years because it declined to be the film everyone ordered. It has real weaknesses: the pacing sags in the middle, the twins recede whenever Whitelaw leaves the frame, and the last act arrives with a dutifulness that suggests contractual obligation to the historical record.

It also contains an idea that no other Kray film has bettered, delivered by an actress at full power, and it is the only version of this story that treats the mythology as the subject rather than the medium. The 2015 Tom Hardy vehicle Legend went back to the rise-and-fall and produced something considerably slicker and entirely weightless. Medak’s film is odder, uglier and worth more.

It circulates on the British catalogue services and in serviceable transfers. Watch it for Whitelaw, and stay for the moment the fairy tale stops working.

Spoilers below

The historical record is public property; the film’s staging of it is another matter. Stop here if you would rather meet it cold.

The two killings are handled in opposite registers, which is the film’s cleverest structural decision. Ronnie’s shooting of George Cornell in the Blind Beggar is brief, public and almost casual — an insult answered, a room full of witnesses who saw nothing, a man walking out into the evening. The film gives it no build. It happens the way a tantrum happens.

Reggie’s killing of Jack “the Hat” McVitie is the opposite: prolonged, domestic, botched, and unbearable. Medak stages it as a party going horribly wrong in someone’s flat, and Tom Bell plays McVitie’s dawning understanding with a helplessness that is far worse than fear. It is the sequence where Ridley’s stylisation collapses completely and the film shows you what these men were actually for. Frances’s death sits underneath it, unstageable and largely unstaged, and Kate Hardie is given almost nothing to work with — the film’s clearest failure.

The arrests and the sentences arrive as an epilogue, dispatched with visible impatience. Medak is not interested in the fall. He is interested in Violet, and the film’s final movement belongs to a mother learning that her sons are exactly what everyone told her they were, and declining, magnificently, to believe it.