The American crime movie was established before the industry moved west to Hollywood and had its first golden age in the 1930s. Partly through our rigid censorship, partly because of middle-class domination, the British crime film didn't become established in our native cinema until the mid-1940s. This was the era of the corruptly alluring spiv, the postwar black market and the reaction against socialist austerity fostered by a combination of the rightwing press and the subversive Ealing Comedy.
At this point the working class emerged as a serious subject for moviemakers, and lower-class criminals began to embrace the ambivalent glamour they had in America and on the continent. A dramatis personae of underworld types was established and a geography of crime mapped out. Their main sphere of activity became London's East End. But a sleazily alluring Soho was established as its emblematic metropolitan enclave, and on occasion excursions took audiences to provincial outposts, most famously the south coast in Brighton Rock and Tyneside with Get Carter.
Challenged principally by horror, crime is now arguably our film industry's main genre. It was the earliest to admit black immigrants and their children on equal terms, and the one sufficiently flexible to stretch from the stylised celebrations of Guy Ritchie's lovable rogues at one end of the spectrum to the earnest social wake-up calls of Kidulthood and Bullet Boy at the other. Ill Manors, the latest runner in a crowded field, is set over a couple of crowded days and sleepless nights in the hustling lives of people living outside the law in east London.
That's where its first-time writer-director Ben Drew, the rapper and hip-hop artist who works under the nom de guerre of Plan B, grew up. Drew and his producers make great claims for its street-cred authenticity. Its first wave of admirers has praised its power and urgency. Both proclaim its originality and superiority to earlier works in the genre. A recent feature in the Observer proclaimed it a significant breakthrough. It's a harsh, forceful film, directed with considerable confidence, but I'm not persuaded by these encomia that it really ploughs new ground.
The punning title of Ill Manors refers to the sink estates, shabby public buildings and dangerous streets of the impoverished, racially mixed area of Forest Gate, and to the aggressive mores of its residents. The latter are familiar types, well played by a cast of experienced and locally recruited actors, some black, some white, and they appear in complementary pairs.
The central couple are the white Ed (played by the non-professional Ed Skrein) and the black Aaron (seasoned performer Riz Ahmed), who've been friends since their days at a local orphanage. Ed is a violent, drug-dealing psychopath, Aaron a gentle reformed criminal trying to go straight in difficult circumstances. Then there's Kirby, a hardened criminal rather older than the others, who's just completed a long jail sentence and is desperately attempting to repossess his turf from his former protege, the vicious usurper Chris.
The third duo are Katya, a desperate central European in flight from Russian sex-traffickers, who links up with Michelle, a crack-head prostitute – a relationship that leads, as these things do in crime movies, to redemption and mutual salvation. Finally Jake, a vulnerable teenager, undergoes an initiation into the gang of drug-dealing would-be gang boss Marcel, a process that involves murder. Other minor figures include a nasty white publican, his sad wife and a violent girl gang.
The paths of these various groups cross, usually explosively. Stolen objects change hands between them, including a cache of drugs, a sizable packet of money, a gun, a mobile phone containing incriminating numbers, and a baby. Everything leads up to a wild, near-risible climax of a melodramatic, soap operatic sort, something predicated, if not dictated, by the hard-driving, hysterical tone.
A key influence Drew acknowledges is that of Tarantino, and the film's form is indebted to the complex Pulp Fiction, where Travolta and company engage in a bizarre dance of death on a narrative Möbius strip. In Ill Manors there are deliberately disconcerting jumps back and forth in time, among them a murder experienced subjectively by the killer long before we see the actual messy execution, and the separation of the baby from its mother that ultimately leads to a dramatic resolution that would have appealed to DW Griffith.
Drew's other significant innovation is to use his own rap numbers about the state of Britain and its troubled young outsiders as a form of dramatic punctuation and a commentary on the characters' lives. One of Drew's recent numbers has been called (by Dorian Lynskey in the Guardian) "the first great mainstream protest song in years". You would, however, have to be better acquainted with his work to appreciate fully the effectiveness of this. This aspect is underlined by the presence of punk poet John Cooper Clarke reading his work in an east London pub, called the Earl of Essex, frequented by several of the characters.
There is a crucial difference between Tarantino's world and Drew's, and it goes to the heart of Ill Manors and may explain why its artistic and social ambitions are never fully achieved. Pulp Fiction is in thrall to criminals, their codes and ways of life. It has no wish to transcend the conventions of the crime thriller. Ill Manors, on the other hand, is a moral work that invites us to judge it on a level with Hubert Selby Jr's puritanical Last Exit to Brooklyn, a novel about the underclass that I imagine Drew admires. He wishes us to see his characters as victims of their environment, trapped in a sticky social web of exploitation and desperation from which they're seeking ways of escape into a world of independence and self-worth.
