Mention the Costa del Crime – that tabloid term for the coastal cities of southern Spain where wanted British criminals lived lives of fear-free luxury in the days before extradition agreements – and a whole gang of screen villains comes to mind.
There are Gal Dove and Don Logan, played so brilliantly by Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley in Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast. There’s Danny Dyer as Frankie in Nick Love’s The Business. There’s Bill Paterson’s Ally Fraser in the second series of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet or Jack Lowden and Tom Cullen as Kenneth Noye and John “Goldfinger” Palmer in the BBC’s Brink’s-Mat drama The Gold, shortly to get its own second season.
But the cinematic possibilities of this seedy, sun-kissed location were first explored by three extraordinary British actors – John Hurt, Terence Stamp and Tim Roth – playing bad guys for a top TV director who, a decade on from a brief flirtation with film, sought to demonstrate that he had what it took to make mature big-screen dramas. The director was Stephen Frears and the film was 1984’s The Hit.
A prolific film-maker these past four decades, it’s often forgotten that Frears’ first stab at film took place a full 13 years before he set off to Spain.
Gumshoe (1971) is a beguiling film noir pastiche starring Albert Finney as a Liverpudlian bingo caller who longs to be the Merseyside equivalent of Philip Marlowe. A critical success if not a commercial triumph, Gumshoe is the sort of film most directors would be thrilled to have made.
Frears, however, wasn’t and isn’t most film directors. “I simply wasn’t mature enough to know how to make films,” he remarked later. “I didn’t know how to connect with an audience.”
To address these self-diagnosed deficiencies, Frears returned to television where, over the course of the next 13 years, he’d direct episodes of the ITV family drama Follyfoot, a trio of Play for Today for the BBC and a particularly well-thought-of adaptation of Three Men in a Boat featuring Tim Curry and Michael Palin.
Come the end of his self-imposed exile, Frears had proven himself able to make anything. Why, he even shot The Bullshitters, The Comic Strip’s inspired send-up of The Professionals.
The Hit was a big step-up all the same. For while screenwriter Peter Prince was familiar to Frears through his BBC work, buccaneering producer Jeremy Thomas had already forged successful working partnerships with the likes of Nic Roeg (Bad Timing, Eureka) and Jerzy Skolimowski (The Shout).
There was also the matter of working with a bona fide screen icon, as Thomas had persuaded Stamp – then notoriously hard to get hold of on account of his nomadic lifestyle – to play the key role of Willie Parker. A mobster-turned-police informer, Parker grasses up his fellow cons on the understanding he’ll be granted immunity and a new life in a foreign country. Leaving the high court to the strains of We’ll Meet Again performed by the men he’s just turned in, we next catch up with Parker a decade later living the good life in southern Spain. His stay in paradise is soon to end, however, as his ex-colleagues are now out of jail and have dispatched two hitmen to drag Parker to Paris so they can bid him bon voyage.
The pair of pros comprise Braddock and Myron. Braddock’s an old hand who likes to see a job through to the end. As portrayed by Hurt, he’s both slippery and prickly. And since Hurt had just shot 1984, Braddock looks so sickly one wonders whether he’ll cark it before he can deliver Parker to his paymasters.
Myron, meanwhile, is callow, feckless and very possibly a psychopath. The role was originally earmarked for Joe Strummer, only for the Clash frontman to become unavailable due to band commitments. In his place appeared Roth, who’d caused quite a kerfuffle a year earlier playing a skinhead called Trevor in Alan Clarke’s TV play Made in Britain.
Although every bit as unhinged as Trevor, Myron is not only a very different animal, he was inspired in part by people who had gone toe-to-toe with the Nazis. As Roth would later explain: “The character was based on bullies I’d known at school, bullies I’d known outside school, and Polish commandos who my dad [the journalist Ernie Roth] had told me about from the second world war. That’s where the razorblades and the collar came from. It was all about street fighting, football hooliganism, some really bad fashion and a really bad dye job.”
Mismatched as they might be, Braddock and Myron collect Parker from the Spanish youths who have kidnapped him and proceed to make their way across the country. A stop in a Madrid safe house adds another to their number, Maggie (flamenco dancer-turned-actress Laura del Sol) who doesn’t seem to speak English but whom Braddock insists on taking with him to ensure fellow house guest Harry (Aussie stalwart Bill Hunter) keeps schtum. And so the four wend their way towards the City of Light, with Myron inevitably falling in love with Maggie and Willie Parker coming on like someone for whom death is but a minor inconvenience.
Speaking of inconveniences, the shooting of The Hit was thankfully quite straightforward. Sure, there were the budgetary and time constraints that afflict any independent production, but major catastrophe was a stranger to the shoot… other than for the time Roth almost killed himself and his male co-stars.
The future Reservoir Dogs actor picks up the story: “I couldn’t drive and yet I was playing the driver. There’s a scene where I drive around a windmill, pull up on the top of a mountainous hill, and me, John and Terence get out. I have a pee, we have a little moment, I get back in the car and we drive away.
“So we do it with me driving. Stephen calls, ‘Cut! Fantastic!’ Someone else then comes over and puts the car back on its original mark, and we go again. After about three or four times, Terence says to me, ‘You’re doing really well. Why not drive back to the mark yourself this time?’ So I drive back round, I put the car on its marks and then I hit the accelerator instead of the brake and we go straight into the camera!
“So I knock the camera off the dolly, the camera goes down the side of the mountain, I carry on down the side of the mountain with Terence and John cracking up in the back. I thought we were all going to die! I managed to get to the bottom of the mountain and brought the car to a halt. The first thing out of my mouth was, ‘I’ll never work again’. Cue Terence and John cracking up even harder.
“We got out, everyone autographed the car – we couldn’t use it again, it was trashed – and we took pictures with it. The producer, Jeremy Thomas, just smiled and said, ‘insurance’, and on we went with filming.”
It’s a good job Roth’s wild ride passed without major incident as we’d have been denied one of Britain’s finest crime movies. Like another fine addition to the country’s crime film collection, Rupert Wyatt’s The Escapist (2008), The Hit is loosely based on a short story by Ambrose Bierce, the American civil war scout-turned-author.
In Parker Adderson, Philosopher, the title character spends the night before he’s due to be executed calmly telling anyone who’ll listen that he alone is in control of his destiny. While Adderson sounds deluded, Stamp’s Willie Parker makes similar claims seem perfectly sensible.
Naturally this only further infuriates Braddock, who has also already had it up to here with the lovesick Myron. Three different generations of British actor playing three very different kinds of Briton – yes, The Hit is clearly a lot more than a film about gangsters being gangsters.
It’s also not just a film about Brits abroad. Here Spain itself is a key character, with the chalk-white windmills adding context to Braddock and Myron’s Quixotic behaviour and the nation’s vibrant history throwing the criminals’ petty squabbling into sharp relief.
The use of unfamiliar locations makes the picture even more diverting. For, rather than the concrete tower blocks of the Costas, Parker makes his home in Almodóvar, an idyllic village near Córdoba. A place so sleepy that mañana is considered to carry too great a weight of urgency, it’s literally the last place you’d expect a Cockney gangster to thrive.
And then there’s the Cola del Caballo, a spectacular waterfall in the grounds of the Monasterio de Piedra near Nuévalos, which provides the backdrop to a key confrontation between Parker and Braddock.
Feeling for all the world like a place you might find in a dream or a fairytale, there’s a chance the Cola del Caballo (translation: Horsetail) looks familiar since it features in Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the Python’s ambitious take on Cervantes’ classic that he spent forever trying to film. In fact, if you watch Lost in La Mancha, the excellent documentary about Gilliam’s previous attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, one of the few sequences he completes is a row between Johnny Depp and a dead fish that’s filmed in the shadow of – where else! – the Cola del Caballo.
If the places are sometimes foreign, a few of the Spaniards we encounter in The Hit are reassuringly familiar. In particular, keep an eye out for Fernando Rey, the sensational Spanish actor who, when he wasn’t a part of Luis Buñuel’s acting company, ran Gene Hackman ragged over the course of the French Connection series of movies.
Released in the UK in September 1984, The Hit would secure a Bafta nomination for Roth and an Evening Standard Best Actor nod for Hurt. Yet neither won, and the film was a critical and box office miss despite sharing some of the DNA of two successful indies of the same year, the Coen Brothers’ debut, Blood Simple, and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas.
The New York Times’s influential Vincent Canby sniffed that Frears has delivered “less a film noir than a film gris, partly because almost all of it takes place in sun-drenched Spain and because the characters talk too much. These guys don’t have to use guns. All they have to do is open their mouths and bore each other to death.”
Yet over the decades, opinions have shifted. In 2009, it received that ultimate stamp of film-making cool, a release as part of the Criterion Collection, which brings “important classic and contemporary films” to a new audience. In a 2017 Time Out poll, director Wes Anderson named it fifth in his top 10 films by British directors, bested by only The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, David Lean’s Oliver Twist, Hitchcock’s Sabotage and Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol.
The likes of In Bruges, Gangster No. 1 and yes, Sexy Beast all owe some debt to The Hit, as do Roth’s Reservoir Dogs for Quentin Tarantino and Stamp’s The Limey for Steven Soderbergh. It didn’t do Hurt’s career much harm, either.
But what was Frears doing in the time it took the rest of the world to cotton on to how marvellous The Hit is? He was busy making My Beautiful Laundrette and Prick Up Your Ears and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Dangerous Liaisons and The Grifters and High Fidelity and Dirty Pretty Things and The Deal and A Very English Scandal and State of the Union – and a dozen further dramas of rare quality and distinction.
Time has rarely been killed more exquisitely. And killing has rarely been more exquisite than it is in The Hit.
