Brighton Rock - Welwyn Garden City-On-Sea
The Boulting Brothers' crime classic might be set on the South Coast but a helluva lot of it was shot in the heart of Hertfordshire.
Films are rarely shot where you'd imagine. Take Casablanca - the nearest Bogie and Bergman got to North Africa was a visit to LA's top Moroccan barber. Then there's St Albans-based auteur Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, where the Beckton gas works stood in for war-torn Indochina. Still closer to home, we have the Boulting Brothers' adaptation of Grahame Greene's Brighton Rock. Over 70 years on from its release, the picture that introduced the world to Richard Attenborough has long been considered a classic. But how much of it was shot on the South Coast? Not as much as you'd imagine.
Founded in 1928, Welwyn Studios had played host to all manner of productions before Messrs Boulting, Boulting and Attenborough came alone. Wildlife documentaries, Anthony Asquith's The Celestial City and A Cottage On Dartmoor, countless 'quota quickies’ - the facility's output couldn't have been more eclectic.
Come the late 1930s, the studio - located in the heart of the town's industrial quarter on Broadwater Road - started to attract big productions and major movie names. Ralph Richardson, Margaret Lockwood, Maureen O'Hara, local girl Dinah Sheridan; even Hollywood's first Dracula Bela Lugosi visited the new garden city.
With Welwyn one of the few studios not to be requisitioned by the government following the outbreak of war, it thrived throughout the conflict, marking itself out as a genuine threat to its local rival Elstree. Michael Rennie, Jack Hawkins, James Mason, Michael Wilding - bona fide A-listers were so often seen around Welwyn, they ceased to be remarkable. Quite how they spent their downtime, we don't know but it's rather nice to think of Michael Dennison and Dulcie Gray promenading down Parkway while Rex Harrison and Anna Neagle enjoyed a coffee in the Welwyn Department Stores before heading back to the set of I Live In Grosvenor Square.
With that picture's director Herbert Wilcox demonstrating how you could recreate Mayfair in the Home Counties, it's little wonder that John and Roy Boulting felt confident that they could conjure up any number of Brighton interiors on the Welwyn lot. It was certainly be a lot easier than filming on location. With their picture telling the story of a young hood (Attenborough's Pinkie Brown) running amok, director John and producer Roy had no end of trouble placating the Brighton elders who feared the film would inspire a copycat crime wave.
Things became so problematic that the Boultings took to 'stealing' shots on the streets of the town using hidden cameras. Similar guerrilla tactics were employed when the brothers filmed a scene at the local racecourse. Since the track had been targeted by real-life knife gangs in the 1930s, there was no way the authorities would give the filmmakers the run of the place. That the frantic nature of the shoot only added to the excitement of the sequence is one of the happy accidents that great movies sometimes enjoy.
In contrast, the Welwyn Studios shoot was positively sedate. Indeed, in the seven decades since the film came out, not a single story has emerged of trouble on the set, of egos clashing, of the filmmakers suffering to capture their vision. Then again, it does help when your cast comprises actors as talented as Hermione Baddeley, Nigel Stock, Harcourt Williams and Dr Who's William Hartnell who’s all but unrecognisable here as no-good gang member Dallow.
And there at the heart of this piece is the utterly delightful Richard Attenborough playing the thoroughly wretched Pinkie Brown. Hired on the strength of his debut performance in Noel Coward/David Lean's In Which We Serve, the moon-faced star doesn't look terribly threatening but that only makes the character all the more unsettling. Attenborough's Pinkie mightn't have been the first baby-faced assassin but that description fits him very well.
Impressive as the cast is, it's all but eclipsed by the behind-the-camera talent. Besides Nobel-nominee Greene adapting his novel in collaboration with future knight Terence Rattigan, the Boultings were as mighty a film force as would come out of this country prior to the emergence of Ridley and Tony Scott. From thrillers like Brighton Rock and Seven Days To Noon to comedies such as I'm All Right Jack and Private's Progress, the twins were as prolific as they were versatile. Brighton Rock, however, remains their masterpiece, a film so good as to be untarnished by a raft of rip-offs and a misfiring '60s-set remake.
Upon its release in 1948, Brighton Rock enraged newspapers and politicians while delighting cinema-goers the length and breadth of the land. Seen today, it's hard to believe that the relatively tame violence could have made anyone think the country was on the brink of moral collapse. Then again, a lot of things have changed over the last 70+ years. Take Welwyn Studios - once Elstree was in the ascendance, the decision was made to shut down the lot in 1951 and sell it off. Years later, Polycell took over the facility, filling the old soundstages with machinery and using the Art Deco entrance building as offices. It was different but it still looked something like a film studio - at least, it did until Polycell left town and the entire site was bulldozed.
Sad as it is that Welwyn Studios is no more, it's wonderful so many terrific monuments to it remain. Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, the Alec Guinness vehicle Last Holiday, Peter Ustinov's Private Angelo - all owe something to the Garden City film hub. And then there's Brighton Rock, a picture set on the coast, shot in WGC and loved by everyone everywhere.
Everyone that is, except for Richard Attenborough's brother. While interviewing Sir David in 2003, I was surprised to hear that he didn't particularly care for the film or for his brother's turn as the psychopath John Christie in Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place. "It's very hard for me," he explained. "I love my brother very much and I have no desire to see him play a murderer."
Oh, and in case you're wondering which of Dickie's films David loves: "Well, Gandhi of course is a work of genius. And who doesn't love The Great Escape?" To which the answer is nobody, although it plays even better on a double-bill with Brighton Rock,
a film with Welwyn Garden City running all the way through it.