Peter Medak’s The Krays is worth seeing for the Kemp brothers and Billie Whitelaw, whose mothering makes its criminals more disturbing. The family scenes hold our attention; the crime story repeats itself and sometimes struggles to frighten.
Peter Medak’s The Krays is a good crime film that becomes more interesting whenever it turns towards the family. It asks how two men can behave like dutiful sons and still be capable of appalling violence, without pretending that the first cancels out the second. We recommend it for that uncomfortable domestic emphasis and for three performances that make it worth pursuing. Anyone looking chiefly for mounting tension, however, will find stretches where Medak holds the same chilly mood for too long.
Philip Ridley’s screenplay gives the twins’ attachment to their mother enough weight to shape our understanding of them. Billie Whitelaw plays Violet with a conviction that makes her affection troubling, even when there is nothing outwardly threatening about her. We were unsettled by her tenderness towards them, because she makes indulging dangerous men look like the ordinary business of being their mother. That domestic loyalty gives the film something more difficult to consider than the familiar question of which gangster is in charge.
Gary Kemp’s Ronald is the stronger of the two central performances, making the coexistence of primness and savagery feel credible. Martin Kemp gives Reggie sufficient presence that the pairing never depends merely on the idea of twins. Together they are convincing enough to prevent the family’s closeness from becoming an amusing gangster eccentricity. The problem is that their threatening behaviour does not always produce much fear, so we sometimes find ourselves studying them when the film seems to want us recoiling.
Alex Thomson’s cinematography helps Medak sustain the cold, uneasy atmosphere, though the visual control can leave the brothers seeming remote. Michael Kamen’s music contributes effectively to that unease, but cannot compensate when the drama itself becomes repetitive. Both serve Medak’s approach faithfully; neither makes the criminal world consistently frightening. The performances within the household offer more variation, allowing affection, dependence and cruelty to trouble us without the film having to insist on its menace.
The repetition becomes a structural problem. Martin Walsh’s editing leaves the film feeling longer than its 119 minutes, largely because further evidence of the twins’ disturbed closeness does not necessarily deepen our understanding of it. Ridley also places more explanatory weight on Violet than the character can reasonably bear. However forcefully Whitelaw plays her, a mother’s possessiveness starts to look like too convenient an answer to the question of why her sons become violent.
Within the gangster biography, this is a worthwhile change of emphasis. Medak avoids treating a police pursuit as the only possible way to organise the twins’ story, and he does not ask us to enjoy cruelty simply because its perpetrators command attention. Yet the carefully maintained atmosphere occasionally puts us at a safe distance from what these men do. The film falls short of the genre’s tougher examples when it gives us too little sense of what their behaviour means for people outside the family.
There is still enough here to justify the evening, particularly for anyone interested in the domestic lives of criminals. The Kemps are persuasive, and Whitelaw gives the family scenes an authority the more openly threatening material cannot consistently match. Allow it an unhurried evening, and give Whitelaw your attention.
