DVD: Brighton Rock (1947) (PG)

The Boulting brothers' 1947 adaptation of Graham Greene's gangsters-by-the-sea thriller is exquisite for many reasons – its tangy Greene and Terence Rattigan script, a turn by the original Doctor Who (William Hartnell) as Dallow, and its horribly effective ghost-ride slaying – but mostly for Richard Attenborough as psychotic Pinkie Brown. Dickie is a match for Jimmy Cagney here as the small-time hoodlum who takes on the police, the Mob and an impressionable café waitress, Rose, in Thirties Brighton. The way he snarls when Rose clings to him is particularly memorable in this precursor to the likes of Badlands and The Long Good Friday.