Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (US: Young Scarface) is a 1948 British gangster film noir directed by John Boulting and starring Richard Attenborough as violent gang leader Pinkie Brown (reprising his West End role of three years earlier), Rose Brown (Carol Marsh) as the innocent girl he marries, and Ida Arnold (Hermione Baddeley) as an amateur sleuth investigating a murder he committed. The film was adapted from the 1938 novel Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, and was produced by Roy Boulting through the Boulting brothers' production company Charter Film Productions. The title comes from the old-fashioned confectionery "a stick of rock": Ida in the film says that like Brighton rock she doesn't change—as the name Brighton stays written the whole way through. The movie is an example of what British film-theorist Peter Wollen has called a "Spiv cycle" movie, defined by its sympathetic treatment of post-war gangsters.