The Critic review: ‘acidic revenge plot in 1930s London’

Set in the 1930s when London’s streets were stalked by Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts, McKellen’s stone-faced critic Jimmy Erskine is a gay hedonist who when he’s not slaying those on stage is risking arrest in the local park.

Ian McKellen[Missing Credit]

The grand paper for which he works is The Chronicle – Daily, not Jewish alas – which has been inherited by the aristocratic and gentlemanly proprietor David Brooke (Mark Strong). Brooke wants to beef up the organ’s credentials as a family newspaper. Erskine finds the new line impossible to toe and when he is fired sets out to wreak his revenge on his employer with bribery and blackmail.

Gemma Arteron[Missing Credit]

Based on Anthony Quinn’s popular novel Curtain Call, the film’s tight-knit group of characters seems hard to credit if you think too long about it. Central to Erskine’s conspiracy is the actress Nina Land (Gemma Arterton) who is bribed with good reviews to seduce the married Brooke. Meanwhile, the proprietor’s haughty daughter Cory (Romola Garai) is unhappily married to Jewish artist Stephen who is desperately trying to reignite his affair with Nina, when he is not painting the portraits of his father and Erskine who belong to the same club.

Yet this melodramatic web has an air of credence thanks to possibly the best screenplay written by Patrick Marber since his Oscar-nominated Notes On A Scandal.

“I shouldn’t have married a Jew,” spits Garai’s Cory (a role, incidentally, somewhat opposite to the one she is about to perform in Giant in which she plays Jewish American publisher Jessie Stone).

In this seedy, sepia vision of 1930s London gracefully directed by Anand Tucker, McKellen’s Erskine is the delicious embodiment of cruelty and wit in ways that make you wonder if it’s possible to have one without the other.