Joseph Losey's The Criminal (1960) hybridizes two complementary genres: the heist film and the prison drama. It's an exemplary work, anchored by the memorable Stanley Baker.Johnny Bannion (Stanley Baker) lords over a high-security system with the complicity of crooked guards and wimpy inmates. Upon release, he teams up with partner Mike Carter (San Wanamaker) to rob a racetrack. The heist itself plays like clockwork, but Bannion's betrayed by his colleagues and winds up back in prison. Attempting to reassert his dominance, Bannion finds his prison mates no longer so accommodating.
The Criminal dances around the conventions of both its story templates, casting Johnny as a high-living gangster obsessed with booze, sex and money, coldly calculating with a scintilla of icy charm. He openly humiliates his unstable girlfriend Maggie (Jill Bennett) while frolicking with Suzanne (Margit Saad), a ditsy hanger-on. His roguishness proves an embarrassment to Mike, agent of a London crime boss pushing for greater organization. Thus the movie takes on the tropes of a Western, with Bannion the old school gunslinger made an anachronism.
Johnny's reckless career's bookended by effective prison sequences. Here Losey and writer Alun Owen do plumb clichés, with inmate infighting, corrupt wardens and a climactic prison riot playing out like clockwork. Still, The Criminal maintains its tension by showing the prison as reflection of the outside world: when Johnny leaves jail, he effectively rules the place. When he comes back, he's harassed, beaten and framed for a fellow inmate's death. These scenes have a brisk, brutal energy that makes contemporaries like The Quare Fellow seem staid.
Any rough elements are smoothed over by Losey's direction, some of his best, most crisply effective work. The prison scenes come to life through Robert Krasker's hypnotic camerawork, notably in a prison riot illuminated by burning scaffolds, dizzying wide angle shots and Johnny Dankworth's jazz score. Equally vivid are Johnny's external exploits, with Losey spicing scenes with perverse touches (an exasperated piano tuner arguing with Mike) or sudden the violence. The movie concludes with a running gun battle in the snow, surely one of the few movies to conclude with a car-and-boat chase, followed by an impressive overhead shot as Johnny staggers wounded through a snowy field.
Stanley Baker plays Johnny with all ferociousness, smug in his ill-gotten gains and natural power. Baker shows Johnny's confidence gradually slipping away, until he's reduced to pathetic melodrama in his final scene. Sam Wanamaker, with his cigarette holder and swanky clothes, makes an effectively effete villain. Margit Saad is pretty though rather one-note; Jill Bennett, that most eccentric actress, proves more memorable with a fraction of Saad's scenes. Supporting roles go to up-and-coming character actors: Patrick Magee, Nigel Green, Neil McCarthy (all of whom costarred with Baker in Zulu), Noel Willman, Murray Melvin and Patrick Wymark.
The worst thing you can say about The Criminal is that its plot and characterizations aren't especially novel. Still, Losey and Baker present Johnny's dilemma with such explosive force it's easy to forgive this shortcoming. An effective dual genre-piece, it's stylish, slick and memorably nasty.
