10/9. Ronnie And Reggie - The Krays (1990)/Legend (2015)
I was in a room or a bar with the Kray twins maybe 100 times," one old-school East End thief told me. "And what youve got to remember is there was nothing glamorous about em. Nothing at all." You can imagine the bemusement of the ageing underworld when Peter Medaks The Krays (1990) featured Gary and Martin Kemp, of '80s New Romantic band Spandau Ballet, as the twins. Not only did the svelte Gary not carry the weighty menace of bisexual thug Ronnie, but the Kemp brothers were neither twins nor anything approaching identical. Bullet-headed thespian and native East Ender Steven Berkoff imbued the character of Ronnies victim George Cornell with a sneering, if hammy, menace. But the peculiar (unintentional?) effect was to pit an older showbiz generation, character actors who played hard men, against well-scrubbed ex-pop stars. Back in the black-and-white world of the '60s - a world away from the bloody Hammer-Horror-meets-Ealing-comedy of The Krays - there was no such generational difference. Cornell was a near contemporary, not much older. The late Tom Bell - who played a cat burglar (based on pro thief Peter Scott of Channel 4s The Heist fame) in He Who Rides a Tiger (1965) and vengeful criminal Frank Ross in tough 1970s TV serial Out - gave a memorably seedy performance as the Krays other gangland murder victim, Jack the Hat McVitie. Though Bell was effective as the doomed, drunken, pill-popping Jack, there was a definite incongruity in the casting: he could have been, if not the Kemps father, then a louche and disreputable uncle. In reality, McVitie only had a few years on the Krays; by the account of people who knew him (like my father) he was a more robust, macho figure than the slurring loudmouth incarnated by Bell. The reasons The Krays gave for Jack the Hats stabbing to death immortalises one aspect of the twins personal mythology: their Auntie May is seen whispering about her that Jack pushed from his moving car and left crippled, all because she mentioned his balding pate. It preserves the legend, propagated by the twins themselves, that they were seeking retributive justice and were unofficial policemen who kept moral order in the East End. In reality, no one can put a name to the unfortunate (and possibly mythical) girl victim. Still, The Krays remains an underrated and contentious piece of Brit cinema. While former East End thieves have derided it as b*ll*cks, playwright Philip Ridley - who, presumably, was commissioned to write the screenplay on the basis of being a Bethnal Green boy - filled it with his personal folklore, to the extent of having the young twins fascinated by toy crocodiles (the animal is a personal icon of Ridleys). The matriarch Vi Kray is given the persona of a steely, vengeful queen out of some tragic drama by the late Billie Whitelaw - nothing like the mumsy figure described by those who knew her. The twins, who believed they had a deal to tell their true story, were bemused by the result and enlisted a documentary team, whose film went straight to video. When Ridley made his own directorial debut with The Reflecting Skin (1991), his gothic vision of the USAs Deep South was no less personally mythologized than the way hed depicted his local East End underworld in The Krays. "Lets hope the new Krays film is better than the first,"* veteran ex-gangster Freddie Foreman tells me. And more than anyone, he has perhaps the right to judge. A notorious gangland figure who recently turned 83, he served a 10-year sentence for disposing of Jack the Hats body. According to old Fred, McVitie precipitated his own murder by making a lot of wild, drunken threats against the twins. "I read the script by Brian Helgeland," says Foreman. "Id taken him down the Punchbowl , had a meal with him because he wanted to do a film with me. But he went back to America and the next thing I know hes doing a script on the twins." In the 1990s, Helgeland adapted James Ellroys seedy panorama of a corrupt 1950s Los Angeles, LA Confidential, into a razor-sharp script. Fred Foreman, relatively sanguine about being bumped off the project, shares the general hope that the screewriter/director can perform a similar feat of period moodiness with the Krays story. But, as he sees it, theres one slight credibility problem: "Hes got Reggie at the window saying, 'I love you, Frances,' to , and shes saying, 'I love you, Reggie.' Its all f*ck*ng Mills and Boon, but the twins were both gay!"* In the intervening years since The Krays, its become more widely known that brother Ronnie was not the gay one. In fact both twins were bisexual and, though Reggie was more inclined to women, its now believed that his marriage to the tragic, suicidal Frances was never consummated. *Quoted from Freddie Foreman: The Last Gangster to be published in September 2015, with an introduction by Tom Hardy.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
