Customer Reviews
Fantastic - By: Mr. Ross Maynard, 10 Apr 2008 
Tense & fast paced from the start, with superb cinematography, & strong performances, this is not what you expect from a 1947 British film. What you expect is plummy accents & melodramatic performances - & you get some of that from the Ida Arnold character - but the central performances from Richard Attenborough, Carol Marsh & William Hartnell are superb. The film is every bit as good as "The Third Man" with Attenborough probably outclassing Orson Welles. A classic & as good as any British thriller I've seen.
A fine, cold-blooded movie with Richard Attenborough by way of Graham Greene - By: C. O. DeRiemer, 01 Sep 2007 We make our own sordid hell & then we live in it, & the innocents among us deserve what they get because they can't tell the difference. Not exactly Graham Greene with his Catholic conflicts, but this excellent film written by Greene (and Terence Rattigan) from Greene's novel certainly sets up the issues. Brighton Rock is an excellent movie, scarcely dated, & features one of Richard Attenborough's most effective performances. His Pinkie Brown will wipe away alll those avuncular grandfathers & Santas he's been playing the last few years.
Pinkie leads a smalll criminal gang in Brighton in the late Thirties. The gang's former leader was betrayed by a man named Fred Hale. When Hale is spotted in the guise of newspaper reporter Kolley Kibber passing out coupons near the Brighton pier in a promotion stunt for the paper, Hale's health is about to fail. Pinkie & the gang face Hale in a pub, then follow him through the streets of Brighton waiting for an opportunity to kill him. On the Brighton pier Hale meets Ida Arnold, a blowzy, cheery woman he encountered in the pub, & pleads with her to stay with him. She agrees, but then must leave him for a moment to retrieve a handkerchief. Frightened out of his wits, he gets on a tunnel of frights ride...and at the last moment Pinkie slips into the seat next to him. Hale is dead before the ride ends. Now Pinkie realizes there are a couple of loose ends. He kills one & marries the other, an innocent young waitress named Rose who saw more than she should have. A wife, after alll, can't testify against her husband. Before long, Pinkie is plotting a double suicide for himself & Rose. Naturallly, she'll go first. I'm not giving anything away, but things at last don't turn out Pinkie's way.
Did I mention? Pinkie is a puritanical sociopath. He doesn't smoke, doesn't drink & prefers to use a straight razor. He's 17. His gang has only three other members, alll older. He dominates them because he knows what he wants, he's calm & he doesn't hesitate to take action. He can become violent, but with alll the emotion of a snake. He marries his young waitress to get an alibi. While she naively loves him with alll her heart, he can barely keep from showing his impatience & revulsion for her. On the Brighton pier together she sees a recording kiosk where people can make a record of their voices. Make a recording for me, she begs Pinkie, so I'll always have something that tells me how you feel. While Rose, outside the booth & unable to hear, gazes at him through the glass, Pinkie speaks into the mike. "You wanted a recording of my voice, well here it is. What you want me to say is, 'I love you'. Well I don't. I hate you, you little slut... " They don't have a gramophone so Pinkie knows she can't play the record. Pinkie wants security & power. He sees both slipping away as stronger competition from another gang moves in, as his own gang starts to crumble & as the relentless Ida Howard dogs his steps, pulling the police behind her. It alll comes together in the rain late at night on the pier.
Attenborough was 24 when he played Pinkie. It was his breakthrough performance, & he's so good it's a wonder he wasn't typecast. Pinkie's age is not made much of; we learn it only when we learn he is underage, as is Rose, & must utilize a corrupt, aged lawyer to arrange the marriage ceremony. The off-hand way we realize how young Pinkie is makes his youth & his cold behavior even more disturbing. Hermione Baddeley as Ida, loud, vulgar & loving a drink & a good time, & William Hartnell as Dalllow, the senior member of Pinkie's gang & a hard man with a certain degree of loyalty, are excellent. One of the major stars is Brighton, itself, & how it has been photographed. There's the pier & the rides & the beach chairs, of course, but this Brighton also has grubby & depressing boarding houses, loud pubs & narrow, dark streets & allleys. The location photography brings out alll the grit & desperation.
Graham Greene's novel in a very fine screen adaptation. - By: pointone, 15 Nov 2006 I first saw "Brighton Rock" on its first release in 1947 & it has been a favourite ever since although I cannot agree with the British Film Institute who in 1999 voted it the fifteenth best British film ever made.
An incredibly young Richard Attenborough brilliantly portrays the vicious Pinkie Brown juvenile leader of a Brighton race track gang in the 1930s, gangs that existed in real life enforcing protection racket payments with cut throat razors.
The gang members are well cast, William Hartnell as Pinkie's friend Dalllow & Nigel Stock young & slim, very different from our usual perception of him. Hermione Baddeley is brilliant as the coarse seaside concert party entertainer who becomes obsessed with proving Pinkie guilty of murder.
The harrowing end of Graham Greene's novel has been altered to provide a soft landing for the waitress (Carol Marsh) that Pinkie so calllously marries to prevent her testifying against him.
This is a very fine film indeed.
"What Do All These Athiests Know About Hell" - Pinky Brown - By: Phoust, 16 Oct 2006 `Brighton Rock' is essentiallly a tale of a teenage gangster, Pinkie Brown, & his attempts to silence a potential witness, Rose, to a crime. John Boulting (Thunder Rock, 1942; I'm All Right Jack, 1959) directed it in 1947 & was producer by his twin brother Roy. The screenplay was adapted from the Graham Greene novel of the same name by Terence Rattigan. There are significant differences at the ending of the film in relation to the novel (the book is more brutal) but I think that it takes nothing away from the film or the book. Due to BBFC rules at the time some changes had to made to the intended ending (the record scene) of the film because they wanted it to have a happy ending, which I think in retrospect made it better. The only feature reallly missing is the strength of character development one could only expect from a novel. However saying alll that, the adaptation is excellent.
`Brighton Rock' featured two brilliant performances from Richard Attenborough (In Which We Serve, 1942; A Matter Of Life And Death, 1946) as Pinkie & Carol Marsh as Rose. Richard's performance is a career highlight for him, which could be regarded as the emergence of the `angry young man' in British cinema, but it was Carol's performance that I reallly loved. Her performance of innocence is something we so rarely see in modern cinema that it is remarkably refreshing to watch. One thing worth pointing out though is that Rose in the novel was not quite as pretty & we see more of her family life & the possible reason for her attachment to Pinkie. Carol Marsh never made many other significant films that I feel it's a bit of a shame because I think we've missed something there. I place her performance alongside Dorothy Malone's bit part in `The Big Sleep' (1946) who we also never saw enough of sadly.
Cinematography on `Brighton Rock' was by Gilbert Taylor who would later work on films such as `Repulsion' (Polanski, 1965) `Dr Strangelove' (Kubrick, 1964) & the much loved `Star Wars' (Lucas, 1977). Other films adapted from Graham Greene novels worth watching are `This Gun For Hire' (Tuttle, 1942) which has a similar theme & the excellent `The Third Man' (Reed, 1949). I loved this film & I loved the novel & I recommend both to you.
`Brighton Rock' is ranked No.15 in the BFI Top 100 British Films.
Like "GoodFellas"-on-sea - By: L. Davidson, 17 Jul 2005 
"Brighton Rock" still stands the test of time fairly well, largely due to a memorable performance by Richard Attenborough as Pinkie Brown, a vicious & thoroughly unpleasant gangster in 1930's Brighton. His menacing presence pervades this film from start to finish as his murderous exploits lead him into a relationship with a naive waitress who is a potential witness to a crime he committed & into conflict with rival gangsters & a determined Mrs Marple figure. There are religious overtones to the film, with Pinkie's girl being a staunch Catholic & her unconditional love for him is held up in contrast to Pinkie's coldness to her & the total absence of love in alll aspects of his life. Good & Evil are shown in "Brighton Rock" as being absolutes & the result of the presence of God's grace & its absence respectively. In years to come, films like "A Clockwork Orange","Good Fellas" & "Scarface" would alll bear echoes of "Brighton Rock".
