Last year, as I walked out of the theater after a showing of the 1947 gangster flick Brighton Rock, one of the men behind me had a question for his companion. “There was a lot of,” and he tried to put it delicately, “Catholic stuff in that. I mean…is that normal?”
Both the 1947 film and this year’s remake are adaptations of a Graham Greene novel, so while Catholicism might be expected, “normal” doesn’t really enter into it. Unfortunately, the new one strips out the elements that make the story work. The old movie offered a chance to watch Richard Attenborough really get his fangs into the role of boyishly lugubrious gangster Pinkie Brown. (An alternate American title was Young Scarface.) The new adaptation offers, primarily, a lesson in how not to translate a dark religious vision for contemporary moviegoers.
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