Colour
Every so often Ernest Borgnine left his genial, bear-like presence behind and went back to being the tough guy of his younger days. (Have you seen ‘Bad Day at Black-Rock’? You really must.) He did old and grizzled in ‘The Wild Bunch’ and he did it before he died in ‘Red’. And here he does it in this bizarre 1980s British movie, as an American gangster, dressed in a pin stripe suit, fedora and with a toothpick constantly between his incisors – like a walking, out of time, homage to John Dillinger. His niece is dead in Mayfair, but Borgnine hasn’t come to London to avenge her, all he’s interested in are the jewels she was carrying. That’s what’s really got his attention. As next of kin the jewels are his, he reasons, and he is going to stomp around the West End – kicking ass and pancaking noses – until he gets them.
Like Robert Stark’s ‘Parker’, Borgnine’s unnamed character is an unfeeling machine. He doesn’t care who gets in his way or who he hurts, all he thinks about is the jewels. Now there are in the Parker series, entries where our lead character is a fish out of water, but he’s still in a locale that is very much America and he learns how to adapt quickly. Here though we have that same unstoppable and untouchable hard guy, but also a quirky ‘ain’t Brits strange’ London travelogue. It makes for an odd movie, with Borgnine’s toughness contrasting with comical cab drivers, unarmed policeman with whistles who can only run helplessly after any perpetrator and gangs of punk rockers lurking around most corners. (Seriously the similarly titled ‘An American Werewolf in London also has menacing punk rockers. Surely any punk rocker in London in 1985 would have felt like they belonged on the ‘Antique’s Roadshow’.) Most baffling is Prunella Scales as an incredibly posh, English divorcee Borgnine meets on the plane and who shows up to flirt with him every so often. Scales plays it with a certain comic charm, but in the face of which this hard as nails version of Borgnine looks actually panicked.
The film is at its best when its lead character is punching people. First off its his niece’s foppish boyfriend, who is forced to abandon his grieving of drinking and enjoying prostitutes to have his face bashed in until he starts spilling the secret life about the dead girl; then it’s onto her drug dealer, who makes the horrible mistake of calling Borgnine “an old fart” and receives a cricket bat repeatedly to his own personal cricket balls; then the drug supplier, who has to be dropped out of a window and through the windscreen of his pride and joy Jag before he’ll cooperate, and on and on. The look on Borgnine’s face says he’s having the time of his life, that all this violence is so much fun. Of course for the film the danger is that all that face-slapping, head-butting and knee-kicking might become a bit unremitting, which is no doubt why it has Scales show up every so often – although the scenes have such a jarringly different tone, they’re amongst the most disturbing here.
So far, so late night Channel 5. But what really elevates it, what takes it above so many other violent films of the 80s, is the final scenes – when Borgnine reaches the top of this criminal empire. And who does he finds there? None other than Lord bloody Olivier. That’s right darling Larry Is lying back on a chez lounge, looking so elderly and weak, but clearly relishing every line of villainous dialogue. And here these two older Oscar winning actors (the 1948 and 1955 vintages, if you’re interested) size each other up, pad around each other, recognise each other’s distinct styles and then play an elaborate game of acting one-upmanship. They’re really tense and delicious scenes that ensures the film builds to a tense and beautifully written ending it in no way deserves.
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