Meet Vic Dakin, your everyday London businessman and murderous, sadistic gang leader: the sort of diamond geezer who would shake your hand prior to nailing your head to a passing milk float. Vic loves his dear old mum and would only ever harm other criminals/anyone who crossed him/random passers-by. His more innocent hobbies include complaining about the decline in British morality – ‘We should never have abolished the National Service’ – and a part-time sado-masochistic gay relationship. Any resemblance between Vic Dakin and Ronnie Kray was quite deliberate.
1971’s Get Carter, directed by Mike Hodges, enjoys a cult afterlife and is now regarded as one of the defining crime dramas of its era. The same year’s Villain, however, quickly vanished into a shadowy existence of late-night television airings. Based on James Barlow’s excellent 1968 crime novel Burden of Proof and adapted for the big screen by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais – then famed for BBC’s The Likely Lads (1965-66) – Villain boasts more than its fair share of quotable dialogue: ‘Stupid punters. Telly all the week, screw the wife Saturday’.
The film’s casting coup was Richard Burton as Vic. When Villain entered production in 1970, Burton’s star was on the wane, but the part allows him to experiment with a Cockney accent that varies between early Sid James and vintage Dick Van Dyke, and to eat the scenery at every conceivable opportunity, albeit not without a sense of humour. Burton portrays Dakin as a very house-proud gangster, who favours an eminently respectable Rover P5B Coupe as everyday transport.
As with Get Carter, the prevailing mood is one of bleak depression, and Michael Tucher’s direction captures a realm of cheap and seedy violence. The film takes every opportunity to display Vic’s sheer brutality, not least when he beats up James Cossins’ bitter office manager, who acts as his inside man in the wages snatch. Villain underwhelmed at the box office, partly because of its utterly unglamorous approach to on-screen violence but also because of Burton’s central role; UK memories of the recently incarcerated Krays may have been fresh, but they were less known elsewhere. But it remains a film that is in dire need of reappraisal. Had Dakin survived to the present day, he would probably have published several volumes of self-justifying memoirs glorifying violence and thuggery. And, perhaps, made the odd ironic cameo in a ‘Brit-Gangster’ flick of the 1990s.
Andrew Roberts, BFI Screenonline
In September 1970 Burton and Taylor were in London for him to make a British gangster film, Villain, for Anglo-EMI. He played a thug with homosexual tendencies, receiving no fee in advance but only a percentage of profits. ‘He did it for his cab fare,’ says a producer. In fact he did it for expenses in cash and kind worth around $80,000. Villain was good in places in a modest, B-picture manner, but Burton added nothing to it except his name in first place, the same size as the title. It might have been any competent actor with raddled features who could snarl in guttural Cockney. The New York Times kept watch on him while filming. He was in a hotel thirty miles out of London, suffering from a cold. He had woken at two in the morning, he said, and heard voices saying ‘Richard, Richard’. The writer, Bernard Weinraub, noted ‘an unmistakable aura of stardom’, but Burton sounded tired. ‘It seems fairly ridiculous’, he said, ‘for someone of 45 or 50 to be learning words written by other people, most of which are bad, to make a few dollars.’ There were still challenges. His ego, he said, would force him to play Lear and Macbeth. Nobody asked when. ‘Fame is pernicious,’ said Burton. ‘So is money.’ The reporter saw his hand shake when he lit a cigarette, and wrote, ‘Despite the bravura voice and style, he appears, at this point, oddly vulnerable, even frail. Somehow, the shadows of the past have deepened. The drinker, the lover, the celebrity, have flickered into a surprisingly weary figure.’
Paul Ferris, Richard Burton (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981)
A contemporary review
After Performance and Get Carter, there appear to be few atrocities left unexplored in the British underworld. But where the latter’s determinedly ‘unsentimental’ approach resulted in an automaton hero and a story-line loose enough to accommodate a maximum number of picturesque deaths in striking locations, Villain’s superficial nastiness (largely a matter of louder and better synchronised punches) conceals a relatively old-fashioned approach to the genre. The story (from James Barlow’s novel Burden of Proof) is tidily plotted; the locations are functional; the bad characters are human enough to elicit sympathy at their downfall; and the film whirrs smoothly into top gear for its last-ditch climax, complete with curtain line. (‘Who are you looking at?’ yells Burton to the audience as he is led away handcuffed.)
Though violence and homosexuality put a Seventies gloss on what is essentially a Fifties-style ‘well-made film’ (of the school of Dearden and Guillermin), the impression is still cosily humanist: Dakin is a vicious thug but loves his mother; Lowis is a coward but suffers from ulcers. It all makes an unnerving contrast to Get Carter’s mechanised and unsuffering hero, and the sentimentality tends to undermine a film that is otherwise ‘well-made’ in the best sense. The performances are uniformly good; the screenplay, by Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement, is witty and laconic; and Michael Tuchner’s direction is thoroughly efficient, with the robbery itself and the bungled getaway brilliantly staged. Perhaps the next British gangster film will locate its hoodlums credibly somewhere between automatism and homeliness.
Nigel Andrews, Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1971
Villain
Directed by: Michael Tuchner
©: Anglo-EMI Film Distributors Ltd.
an Anglo-EMI film
a Kastner/Ladd/Kanter picture
Production Company: Winkast Film Productions *
Presented by: Nat Cohen
Executive Producer: Elliott Kastner
Produced by: Alan Ladd Jr, Jay Kanter
Production Associate for EMI: Richard Du Vivier *
Production Supervisor: Gavrik Losey
Production Manager: James M. Crawford
Production Assistant: Joyce Herlihy
Producer’s Assistant: George Pappas
Assistant Director: Kip Gowans
2nd Assistant Directors: David Wimbury, Nicholas Hippisley Coxe *
Continuity: Ene Watts
Casting: Rose Tobias Shaw *
Screenplay: Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais
From the novel ‘The Burden of Proof’ by: James Barlow
Adapted by: Al Lettieri
Director of Photography: Christopher Challis
Camera Operator: John Harris
Editor: Ralph Sheldon
Art Director: Maurice Carter
Set Decorator: Andrew Campbell
Wardrobe Supervisor: Jimmy Smith *
Make Up: Alec Garfath
2nd Make-up: Ron Berkeley *
Hairdresser: Allan McKeown
Titles by: National Screen Service Ltd.
Filmed in: Panavision
Colour by: Technicolor
Music Composed by: Jonathan Hodge
Arrangements by: Steve Gray
Sound Recordist: John Bramall
Dubbing Mixer: Len Abbott
Recorded at: EMI-MGM Elstree Studios
Dubbing Editor: Don Sharpe
Studio: Goldhawk Studios *
Cast
Richard Burton (Vic Dakin)
Ian McShane (Wolfe Lissner)
Nigel Davenport (Bob Matthews)
Donald Sinden (Gerald Draycott)
T.P. McKenna (Frank Fletcher)
Joss Ackland (Edgar Lowis)
Fiona Lewis (Venetia)
Cathleen Nesbitt (Mrs Dakin)
Elizabeth Knight (Patti)
Colin Welland (Tom Binney)
John Hallam (Terry)
Tony Selby (Duncan)
Del Henney (Webb)
James Cossins (Brown)
Ben Howard (Henry)
Anthony Sagar (Danny)
Clive Francis (Vivian)
Stephen Sheppard (Benny Thompson)
Brook Williams (Kenneth)
Wendy Hutchinson (Mrs Lowis)
Michael Robbins (Barzun)
Sheila White (Veronica)
Cheryl Hall (Judy)
Shirley Cain (Mrs Matthews)
Lindy Miller (Gilly)
Godfrey James (car lot manager)
Bonita Thomas (strip dancer)
Leslie Schofield (detective-constable)
Paul Hardwick, Michael Munn *
UK 1971©
98 mins
35mm
*Uncredited
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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