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TO JOHN BOULTING

John Boulting (1913–85) and his twin brother Roy (1913–2001) founded Charter Film Productions in 1937. Working from a script by Greene and Terence Rattigan (1911–77), John Boulting directed Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock (1947).

18th September, 1946

Dear John,

I have finished reading through Terence Rattigan’s outline treatment of Brighton Rock, and I agree with you that it provides a good skeleton to work on. There is no point in criticising small details of dialogue or scene at this stage, and I think my only major criticisms are as follows: –

(1) I think the boy Pinkie has got to be established as the solitary central figure of the film, and we must to some extent reduce the importance of Ida so as to throw him in solitary relief.

(2) This arises partly out of (1) and partly out of what you may consider a personal fad. I never feel that films that start on long shots are satisfactory. I feel the American practice of nearly always starting on close-up is much more imaginative. How often one has seen an English film which begins with a long shot of a holiday resort: to my mind the opening shot suggested here would stamp the film unmistakably as pre-war British. My own rough idea of the opening of the film is to present by a succession of close-ups the atmosphere of Brighton waking up for Whit Monday – curtains being raised or shutters drawn back in the shops: the day’s newspaper poster featuring Kolley Kibber being squeezed under the wire framework of a poster board: the fun cars on the pier being polished: all the shots close-up or semi close-up and culminating in a close-up of the boy spread-eagled in his clothes on the brass bedstead: entrance of Dallow: a newspaper spread in front of the boy’s eyes by Dallow with the headlines about Kolley Kibber: the boy sitting up in bed: cut stop. I express this very roughly and loosely but perhaps you will see the kind of tempo I feel the film should begin on. In this way the boy is established before Hale who is after all a minor character disposed of very quickly.

(3) I am very pleased at the way in which Rattigan has tried to keep the central theme of the book: that is to say, the difference between Ida who lives in a natural world where morality is based on Right and Wrong, and the boy and Rose who move in a supernatural world concerned with good and evil, but I feel this is sometimes a little over-emphasised (a small example is the play on the name of the horse Satan Colt), and in a more important place under-emphasised – that is to say I think somehow we ought to insert in the film after Pinkie’s death the notion expressed in the book by the anonymous priest in the confessional of ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’.

(4) I like Rattigan’s idea of the murder in the Fun Fair train, but it does make the coroner’s verdict rather inexplicable.

(5) I like his idea of making Corkery into a bookmaker. This certainly tightens up the story.

(6) A last and really not very major point is that one has lost any point to the title. The title of the book had two significances: first, the murder of Hale took place in one of the small booths underneath the pier where Brighton Rock is sold, and secondly, a point we can easily introduce into the later treatment, the passage where the boy speaks of himself as knowing nothing but Brighton and the comparison with Brighton Rock which, wherever you bite it, still leaves the name of the place showing.



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Date: 2015-02-03; view: 667


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