Film: Double Dealing

HAVE not been a great admirer of the films of Britain’s Mike Hodges, whose Get Carter is considered a masterpiece of the noir genre. Some of them, like Damien: Omen II and Flash Gordon, I bypassed. The original Omen was bad enough to make a sequel counterindicated, and films made from comic strips, though hugely popular, strike me as slumming. I also avoided Morons from Outer Space; we have enough homegrown ones.

So I am late getting around to Croupier, Hodges’s very interesting latest, with a screenplay by Paul Mayersberg. This is the story of Jack Manfred, a writer struggling with his first novel, whose father helps him get a job as a croupier at London’s Golden Lion Casino, the kind of work Jack once did in his native South Africa. Jack is uneager, but needs the money; besides, the job might yield material for his novel.

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HAVE not been a great admirer of the films of Britain’s Mike Hodges, whose Get Carter is considered a masterpiece of the noir genre. Some of them, like Damien: Omen II and Flash Gordon, I bypassed. The original Omen was bad enough to make a sequel counterindicated, and films made from comic strips, though hugely popular, strike me as slumming. I also avoided Morons from Outer Space; we have enough homegrown ones.

So I am late getting around to Croupier, Hodges’s very interesting latest, with a screenplay by Paul Mayersberg. This is the story of Jack Manfred, a writer struggling with his first novel, whose father helps him get a job as a croupier at London’s Golden Lion Casino, the kind of work Jack once did in his native South Africa. Jack is uneager, but needs the money; besides, the job might yield material for his novel.