Villain: Richard Burton's Vicious London Gangster

1971 produced two British gangster films and British cinema only had room for one. Get Carter went north, gave Michael Caine a shotgun and a grudge, and became the film every subsequent London hard man would be measured against. Villain came out within months of it, stayed in London, gave Richard Burton the same era and a worse temper, and vanished. One of these films is on every list of the best British crime pictures ever made. The other is a footnote with Burton’s name on it, and the footnote is a better film than its reputation allows.

Vic Dakin runs a firm in London. He lives with his mother, whom he adores and visits at the seaside. He has a lover, Wolfe Lissner (Ian McShane), whom he beats and needs in roughly equal measure. He tortures people personally, at close range, with evident satisfaction, and then goes home and makes tea. Everyone who has ever read about Ronnie Kray will recognise the shape immediately, and the shape is deliberate: the Krays had been convicted in 1969, two years before this film reached the screen, and the details of the mother, the sexuality and the sadism were in every newspaper in the country.

Written by the men who wrote Porridge

The most disorienting credit in British crime cinema belongs to this film. The screenplay is by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, adapting James Barlow’s novel The Burden of Proof.

Clement and La Frenais had already made The Likely Lads and would go on to Porridge, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and half the affectionate comic furniture of British television. They are the great writers of English blokes being decent to each other in difficult circumstances. And here they are in 1971, writing a film in which a man’s face is cut open in a bath, with an ear for the exact rhythm of how villains actually speak to one another — the banter, the endearments, the way a threat arrives inside a joke.

That ear is what Villain has that most British gangster films do not. The firm is funny. The dialogue is full of the mundane grumbling of employees, and the violence keeps arriving in the middle of the grumbling without changing the register. It is a comedy writer’s insight, and it is truer to the documented reality of organised crime than any amount of operatic menace: these were small businesses staffed by tedious men, and the atmosphere in the room was mostly boredom.

Burton, at the wrong moment, doing the right thing

Richard Burton in 1971 was in the middle of the long decline — the great stage actor of his generation working through a run of paycheques, drinking, married to the most famous woman alive, taking what came. Villain is one of the films from that period, and he is extraordinary in it.

What he finds in Vic Dakin is a man whose violence is not instrumental. Dakin does not hurt people to send messages; he hurts people because it is the only thing that reliably makes him feel present, and he is embarrassed about it afterwards in the way a man is embarrassed about an appetite. Burton plays the tenderness with his mother absolutely straight and without a wink, so that the film cannot be read as camp — the love is real, and it coexists with the razor, and no reconciliation is offered. He plays the scenes with McShane the same way: possessive, wounded, humiliating, and pathetically dependent. McShane, twenty-eight and beautiful, gives him nothing back except calculation.

The case against the performance is well established and I will not pretend otherwise. Burton’s Cockney is not good. That Welsh instrument was not built for the Bethnal Green vowel and it wanders, particularly when he raises his voice, and there are lines where you can hear an actor from Pontrhydyfen reaching for something out of range. If that breaks the film for you, it breaks the film. What it costs in surface plausibility it repays in something stranger: Dakin sounds like a man performing a version of himself, which for a gangster of that specific vintage is not obviously wrong.

The wage snatch

The set-piece is a payroll robbery, and it is the reason to argue for Michael Tuchner as more than a journeyman.

Dakin’s firm is a protection and extortion operation, and the robbery is a stretch — a bigger, more logistically demanding job than these men have the competence for, taken on because Dakin needs the money and has decided he is capable. Tuchner shoots the planning as farce and the execution as a car crash. It is loud, disorganised, badly timed, and full of men shouting at each other in the road. Nobody is cool. The vehicles do not behave. Someone gets hurt who was not supposed to.

Set that beside the way the genre usually stages a robbery — the clean geometry of The Outfit, the clockwork of the classical heist — and the difference is the whole point of Villain. This firm is not professional. Its principal is a sadist with a temper who has never in his life planned anything, and the film’s argument is that the actual Krays were exactly this: frightening men with poor judgement, running a business that could not survive an ambitious week.

The look, and the problem with London

Tuchner came from television and the film shows it, which is both the complaint and, in one respect, the achievement.

Get Carter has Newcastle. Wolfgang Suschitzky shot it as an environment — the multi-storey car park, the ferry, the terraces running down to the Tyne — so that Hodges’ film has a place to be about, and half its permanence comes from that. Villain has London, which in 1971 every British production had, and Christopher Challis photographs it without a single postcard in it: mews, saloon cars at kerbs, a seaside boarding house, a flat, an unremarkable arterial road. No landmarks. No skyline. The capital as a set of interiors and the roads between them.

That flatness is usually filed as a deficiency and I think it is the film’s most honest decision. Dakin’s world is small. He is not a lord of London; he runs a few streets, knows a few people, and the horizon of his ambition is the takings of a payroll van. Give him a skyline and you have inflated him into the thing the film is arguing he is not. The television grammar — mid-shots, rooms, faces, available light — keeps the whole enterprise at the scale of a man who thinks a mews in the dark is a serious address.

It costs the picture its iconography, which is why it lost. Nobody has ever put a still from Villain on a wall, because there is no image in it that means anything without the ninety minutes around it.

Where it fits, and why Get Carter won

Three British films between 1968 and 1971 tried to work out what a gangster was: Performance, shot in 1968 and shelved until 1970, which dissolves the hard man into a hall of mirrors; Get Carter, which strips him to a function and points him at concrete; and Villain, which sits him down with his mum.

Get Carter won because it is cold and Villain is hot, and cold ages better. Hodges gives you a man with no inner life and a landscape, which reads as modern forever. Tuchner gives you a psychology, and psychology dates. Caine’s Carter is an icon; Burton’s Dakin is a case study, and nobody puts a case study on a poster.

The film also arrived without a champion. Tuchner was a television director making his feature debut and went back to television. Burton’s stock was falling. The picture got the reviews a violent film with a homosexual villain got in 1971, several of which were considerably nastier about the sexuality than about the razor.

The case against

Beyond the accent: the film is structurally lumpy. The blackmail subplot involving an MP (Donald Sinden) is a novel’s plot doing novel’s work, and it slows the middle badly. Nigel Davenport’s detective is a policeman from central casting, present to exert pressure and say the theme. And the film wants both the sociological reading and the lurid one, exactly as its era’s tabloids did, so it is never entirely clear whether Dakin’s sexuality is characterisation or evidence — a confusion the film shares with the country that made it.

Where it sits

Villain has been on and off British discs for decades and shows up in season programming whenever someone is running the 1971 crime year properly. It is worth ninety minutes of anyone’s time who cares about British genre cinema, and it pairs beautifully with The Krays, which twenty years later would tell the same story with the names attached and considerably more mother in it.

Watch it for Burton, who had every reason not to bother and bothered anyway.

Spoilers below

Dakin is taken down by his own household.

The wage snatch is the hinge. It fails — noisily, expensively, with casualties — and the failure puts the firm under a pressure it has no organisational capacity to absorb. Dakin’s response is to reach for the only tool he has, which is terror applied to his own people, and a business held together by fear of its principal comes apart the moment the principal is more frightening than the police.

Wolfe is the crack. He has been the film’s real subject all along: a man being used, beaten, kept and paid, who has spent the picture calculating and has been careful never to be seen calculating. When Matthews leans on him, the leverage is not the law. It is the certainty that Dakin will eventually kill him, and that Wolfe has known this since before the first reel. He gives Dakin up because the alternative is waiting to be given up to. It is the flattest, least dramatic betrayal in the British gangster canon — no anguish, no confrontation, a man choosing the option with the higher survival rate.

Burton’s last scenes are the film’s justification. Dakin, arrested, in custody, comprehends what has happened to him and to whom, and the fury that comes out of him is not the fury of a criminal caught. It is a lover’s. He is not raging at a system or a copper or a sentence. He is raging at the person who was in his house, whom he beat and kept and could not survive without, and who has done to him precisely what he would have done first if he had thought of it.

Which is why the film’s title is a small joke that only pays at the end. British crime cinema in 1971 was building the villain as a figure of style — the coat, the shotgun, the shark’s smile, the man you would want to be for two hours. Tuchner spends ninety minutes with the actual article and shows you a bully who lives with his mother, cannot organise a robbery, and is destroyed by a boy he was too vain to see coming. There is nothing to want here at all, and that is the picture’s honesty and precisely why nobody bought a poster of it.