Why the low-budget British gangster film is in the doldrums: Filmmakers can’t just go on making film after film about the Essex Boys murders

Derided by critics but with a long shelf life, the Essex Boys gangster films follow in a very long tradition, says Geoffrey Macnab, who looks back at the history of the genre

Craig Fairbrass as Pat Tate, Josh Myers as Ken and Emily Wyatt as Charlotte in ‘Rise of the Footsoldier 3’

If there is one genre that will never die, it’s the low-budget British gangster movie. No amount of derision can kill it off. Over the years, gangster films (at least those that have made it into cinemas at all) have received some of the most vicious reviews imaginable.

“The most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen,” the Monthly Film Bulletin wrote about 1948 James Hadley Chase shocker No Orchids For Miss Blandish. This was a British attempt at hardboiled noir. The critics called the film (about the kidnapping of an heiress) “repellent” and “the worst film I have ever seen”, “unpardonable” and a “disgrace”. It wasn’t so much the faltering attempts at American accents or the inept action sequences that upset them as the sex and violence.

70 years on, critics are continuing to put the boot into British gangster films, especially those made in Essex. “Odious and shoddily made,” was the verdict of one national newspaper on Rise Of The Footsoldier (2007). “Equally dire” and “very poor indeed” lamented the critics about its sequel Rise Of The Footsoldier 2 (2015). That hasn’t stopped the producers from coming back for more. Rise Of The Footsoldier 3, billed as a prequel, is due out this autumn. “That’s how we do things in Essex,” its main character, gangster Pat Tate (Craig Fairbrass) is shown in the trailer telling some poor bloodied victim he has just beaten to a near pulp.

Notorious gangster, Pat Tate, played by Fairbrass, rises through the ranks of Essex’s criminal underworld in ‘Rise of Footsoldier 3’

Fans of westerns know that the Johnson County War in Wyoming in the early 1890s (essentially a series of low level skirmishes between settlers and the cattle barons who wanted them off the land) have inspired dozens of movies. The same basic story has been told again and again in films from Shane to Heaven’s Gate.

Many of the new batch of British gangster films also take their inspiration from a single event, namely the Rettendon murders in December 1995, when three drug dealers (including Tate) were found shot in a Range Rover down a country path. This single bloody incident inspired not only Essex Boys (2000) but also the Footsoldier films, Bonded By Blood (2010), The Fall Of The Essex Boys (2013), Essex Boys Retribution (2013) and Essex Boys: Laws Of Survival (2015). There is a clear overlap between these films and their sister genre, the football hooligan movies, which have been made in profusion over the last 20 years.

What most of the films have in common is that they get lousy reviews, barely surface in cinemas but then have a surprisingly long afterlife on DVD and VOD. They may be based on the exploits of real-life, contemporary underworld figures but the films follow in a very long tradition.

A real blast: Vincent Regan as Mickey Steele in ‘Bonded by Blood’ (Rex) (Rex Features)

Hollywood had Cagney and Bogart. The British industry responded with its own wave of gangster films, sometimes glossy affairs made by US directors in exile or featuring US studio stars but sometimes very British indeed. The Boulting brothers’ Graham Greene adaptation Brighton Rock (1947) is one of the best known British gangster films but there were plenty of others too which came complete with spivs, Dixon of Dock Green-like coppers, and blowsy, world-weary bar maids and landladies.

Jules Dassin’s Night And The City (1950) was a minor classic. Starring Richard Widmark as a small-time hustler and aspiring wrestling promoter, the film (which was financed by Fox) is celebrated for its evocation of postwar Soho in all its seediness, corruption and vitality. Nick Love (director of The Football Factory ) is attached to direct a remake. On a similar tack was Richard Vernon’s Street Of Shadows (1953), with Cesar Romero as a Bogart-like nightclub owner in Soho. Then, there was John Lemont’s The Frightened City (1961), starring Herbert Lom as a dapper gangster boss alongside a youthful Sean Connery,

Mirror image: Alex Kingston and Sean Bean in ‘Essex Boys’ (Rex Features)

The sub-genre of gangster films set outside London included Val Guest’s Manchester-set Hell Is A City (1960), in which a tormented detective (Stanley Baker) goes after an armed robber, and Stanley Hayes’s Newcastle-set Payroll (1961). Baker was even more impressive on the other side of the law in Joseph Losey’s The Criminal.

Before the Essex Boys murders provided fresh inspiration, the British continued to make their gangster flicks. The Great Train Robbery was the inspiration for a number of films, among them Robbery, again starring Stanley Baker and Buster (1998). The 1970s and 1980s offered us the mind-bending Performance (1970), Michael Caine with a shotgun in Get Carter (1971) and Bob Hoskins as the East End Napoleon in The Long Good Friday (1980).

Then came the mockney years. Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) spawned all too many imitators. Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000) was the most original of the gangster films made in the wake of Lock, Stock.

Criminal minds: William Hartnell and Richard Attenborough in ‘Brighton Rock’ (Rex Features)

The difference between the more recent Essex Boys-style gangster films and the predecessors mentioned above is that films like Rise of The Footsoldier and Bonded By Blood tend to be shot on very small budgets with lowish-voltage actors like Fairbrass, Danny Dyer and Tamer Hassan in the leading roles. They’re B-movies. The best of them, though, have a drive that bely their reputation as cheap, straight-to-video exploitation fodder. The worst of them are pumped up with just far too much testosterone, posturing and violence. They are often very derivative of Scorsese’s gangster films, of which they sometimes appear to be crude British remakes. The critics tend to regard them as thoroughly toxic. 2015’s Legend, with its bravura dual performance from Tom Hardy as both Ronnie and Reggie Kray, was, at last a British gangster film with very high production values – one that didn’t end up with three underworld figures being shot in a Range Rover in a muddy Essex field.

Gangster films are almost as old as cinema itself. Scorsese likes to point out that they were being made in the US by directors such as DW Griffith and Raoul Walsh even before the First World War. The British may have been slow in embracing the genre but have been making up for lost time by producing them in such quantity over the last two decades.

There is a feeling among even some of their own producers that the low-budget British gangster film is now in the doldrums and needs to be rethought. Filmmakers can’t just go on making film after film about the Essex Boys murders. Then again, the genre has obvious attractions. Young directors love to make them, financiers are keen to back them and there’s still clearly some appetite for them, at least on video. The rise of these footsoldiers hasn’t been stemmed quite yet.

‘Rise of the Footsoldier 3: The Pat Tate Story’ is released on 3 November