(1960 - Great Britain)

Starring Stanley Baker, Sam Wanamaker, Patrick Magee, Jill Bennett; dir: Joseph Losey

When criminals systematically target bigtime robber Johnny Bannion (Baker) in the second half of The Concrete Jungle, their campaign is a clear parallel to the penal system that tried to control him in the first. "There’s no place for someone like you in an organisation", Bannion’s betrayer and former confederate Mike Carter (Wanamaker) tells him. Two systems, one criminal and one society’s, treat the individual remarkably similarly in The Concrete Jungle. Ironically one crim admonishes another later in the film, amidst the chaos of a prison riot, "you need a system or it’ll go amok".

Losey’s theme emerges gradually and its impact derives substantially from the impact of Stanley Baker at its center. Bannion is a star, treated with deference both by the authorities (inside and out) and idolatry by the underling hoods. Baker’s muscular charisma (lacking the feminine side of Sean Connery, he never made the Atlantic crossing to bigger things), and Losey’s empathetic positioning of audience point of view, puts us onside with Johnny even as we register the danger of his brutal smarts. It all adds to the vicarious thrill of this ride through a very Anglo underworld (but why is it that moviemakers always associate crims’ parties with wild be-bop jazz?!?).

Director Joseph Losey was in fact American and a victim of the McCarthyist black list. So much black list energy surrounds The Concrete Jungle it suggests a heretofore undisclosed network of blacklistees in Europe. Mike Carter’s key role is played by the exiled American liberal filmmaker Sam Wanamaker, while the Bannion role recalls Baker’s memorable turn in the thrilling Hell Drivers (1957 - a superior flick to the comparable truckin’ thriller Wages of Fear [1953]), directed by blacklistee Cy Endfield, with whom Baker would work again on Zulu (1964). The Concrete Jungle’s hybrid Euro/Hollywood feel recalls the mix of U.S. filmmaking language and Continental sexual frankness of Riffifi (1955), directed by another blacklistee, Jules Dassin. Certainly it’s easy to see why The Concrete Jungle’s story of a marked man would appeal to Losey.

As it moves from prison to wild parties and a racetrack heist (honoring Kubrick’s 1956 The Killing in the breach, this portrayal is far less detailed), the entire film is not just ultra-tough but cacophonous, subtly underlining just how trapped in this unaesthetic world Bannion really is.

Prison as a corrupt quasi-society is really captured by The Concrete Jungle – there is little pretense the inmates aren’t substantially running their own show, a world-within-a-world that is frankly acknowledged by prison staff.