10 Legendary Movie Criminals
Who did The Krays better? Tom Hardy or Spandau Ballet.
They say that pretty soon theyll all be dead. Just as there are ever fewer people left in Britain who lived through the last World War as adults (as opposed to evacuated children), and the sum of our collective memories will lie in sepia photos and black-and-white film, the generation that followed the war years is starting to thin out. Grannies in leather mini-skirts and granddads in biker jackets remember a post-war boom that brought rock n roll; the Pill; the permissive society; mods and rockers; the drugs explosion. Still, the way of all flesh beckons. But what of that other cultural explosion that established itself as a true counterculture of the swinging '60s? It was a decade where the traditional deference of the British began to fade, and new liberal values ensured that criminals would no longer swing (at least not from the end of a rope). To most of us, British gangsterdom is popular myth. What we know comes from feature films that turn rumour into legend, granting amoral glamour to names that were bywords for thuggish brutality: Ronnie. Reggie. Charlie. Frankie. Im just about old enough to have met some of these old miscreants, often in their twilight years. They all had stories to tell, often in contradiction of each other, and the Brit flicks granted just one more layer of legend...