Three films that show all the different sides of London

Walking the increasingly frosty, too-early-dark streets of London this week, I found myself thinking not only of how much the city has changed in the twenty years since I was last here, but also of how very different in many ways and very similar in others it is to the visions of the city placed on screen over the decades.

London is a bustling, fast-moving, cosmopolitan city where the hopes, dreams and ambitions of millions of people from all over the world converge within its maze of ancient nooks and crannies, under grey, wet skies that make everyone, especially in winter, determined to just get to where they need to be and mind their own business.

Here are three films that explore different aspects of the British capital from different perspectives over the years and which still stand out not just for their atmospheric onscreen visions of London, but also for the stories they offer of distinctively London characters hustling, kicking and negotiating their way through the ever-changing, yet familiar and constant, pressures of a place that’s always moving and striving towards its next, uncertain incarnation.

The arthouse essential

• A Clockwork Orange – rent or buy from Apple TV

Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian masterpiece from 1971 may have lost some of its outrage and shock value since the director pulled it from cinemas, after the antics of its characters provided fuel for real-life imitations of violence on London streets at the time. However, its cold, laser-focused depiction of a future London ruled by violence, misogyny and angry, disaffected youth still rings too uncomfortably true over half a century later.

Adapted from the novel by Anthony Burgess, Kubrick’s version is a manic, violent and thrilling piece of visually arresting cinema, carried by the chillingly mercurial performance by Malcolm McDowell, a pioneering experimental score by Wendy Carlos and the singular pop art designs of John Barry. It all adds up to a still dazzling style and tone, if somewhat outdated in themes, nightmarish examination of the burning issue of societal violence and what to do about it.

Kubrick may have had a view on the issue that’s a little conservative, stuffy and shrilly Orwellian, but he wasn’t completely wrong, as history has shown. His argument was couched in some of the most memorable imagery ever put to celluloid.

As a picture of London, it’s one that’s grim and depressing, and it exposes the contradictions between its grand imagining of progress and the inhospitable nature of the modernist brutal architectural vision of it that still blot the landscape.

It’s also a key film in marking the moment at which the swinging London ’60s ideal was overrun by the bitter economic battles and social divisions that would mark the reality of the industrial decline of Britain in the 1970s and the rise of ruthless capitalism that would see it through from the Thatcher era to the Brexit crisis of recent years.

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The stone-cold classic

• Night and the City – YouTube

American director Jules Dassin and film noir leading man stalwart Richard Widmark brought their particularly dark post-war psychological anxieties to London in 1950 for this twisty, fish-out-of-water tale set in the underworld of the city’s wrestling scene.

Widmark plays hustler Harry Fabian, an American living in London and making his living in the city’s rough nightclub world. When he decides to improve his fortunes by getting involved in underground wrestling, but soon finds that his American toughness is no match for the tough, cutthroat London gangsters he’s soon running from.

Dassin and cinematographer Max Greene craft a dark, shadowy vision of the city that complements Harry’s descent into a world he increasingly finds himself threatened by and unable to control.

As a superior example of the post-war masculinity crisis of men thrown back into normal life after the horrors of the World War 2 the film stands as one of the great noirs, but as an outsider’s vision of an unfamiliar city and the eccentric, memorably dangerous characters who inhabit its shadows, it’s almost unparalleled.

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The diamond in the rough

• Dirty Pretty Things – rent or buy from Apple TV

Stephen Frears’ dark drama about the hard, often dangerous existence of illegal immigrants living in the margins of London society still packs as hard a punch as it did when it was released twenty years ago. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Audrey Tatou and written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, it’s a confident mix of gritty social realism and tense thrills that shines a much needed light on the realities of life for millions of the city’s undocumented residents in the pre-Brexit, pre-Tory chaos of the present.

Ejiofor plays Nigerian immigrant Okwe, a taxi driver and hotel attendant who shares his matchbox living quarters with Audrey Tatou’s Turkish émigré Senay. When Okwe makes a grim discovery one night in a hotel room toilet, he and Senay find themselves thrown into the shadowy world of the city’s black market that will challenge their moral certainties and lead them to make heartbreakingly difficult decisions to protect themselves from the ever-present looming threat of deportation.

Thanks to Frears’ keen sense of place and empathy for the predicament of its ordinary characters caught up in the swell of larger forces beyond their control and a slow-burning, carefully plotted, script by Knight, the film succeeds on both its levels as a social realist slice of life drama and a taut London back-alley thriller, buoyed by a stellar performance from Ejiofor and distinctively noirish cinematography from the legendary Chris Menges.

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