Cinema: Kingdom of Crime

The Concrete Jungle is a strange, taut, jagged British crime movie. Its cool, boppy jazz score composed by Johnny Dankworth surcharges the action, and at the same time keeps saying, with ironic nonchalance, “Tomorrow we die.” Robert Krasker’s camera work is broodingly desolate outdoors, stiflingly claustrophobic indoors, emphasizing always the jumpy, fragmented quality of modern existence.

What is most potently fascinating in Jungle is also most subtle: U.S.-born Director Joseph Losey’s vision of the world of crime as a self-contained universe without external points of reference. Normal society judges and humanizes itself from ethical and spiritual vantage points that are above society. The terror of criminal society, as Losey presents it, is that it is a kingdom of one-eyed men, whose lack of ethical depth perception prevents them from seeing, knowing, or redeeming themselves.

The criminal-hero marked for destruction is a tight-lipped swaggering cock of the prison walk named Johnny Bannion (Stanley Baker). Even Chief Warder Barrows (Patrick Magee) caters to Bannion. Indeed, Losey’s knowing development of the prison’s internal and external linkup of influence peddling helps to strengthen his portrait of the criminal’s hermetically sealed environment.

Johnny gets out on parole. First night his cronies celebrate with a little corybantic in which gangster cuties are sent slithering across tables, sofas and floors as casually as spilled drinks. Johnny finds a nude Continental bunny (Margit Saad) in his own bed, and after that night she sticks as close to him as a birthmark. He has a bigger caper in mind, lifting £40,000 from a race track. To the syncopated beat of the score, the job goes off with tingling finesse. In a bleak, snow-bitten field, Johnny digs a hole and buries his loot; two reels later, when the crime syndicate crushes him, it proves to be his grave. The sound track mourns and mocks him with the teasing, empty sensuality of a saxophoney prison-ballad blues.