![]() ![]() The Hit was written by Peter Prince, who’d worked with Frears on four TV dramas. 1, Sexy Beast, and In Bruges, and the stateside equivalents made by the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino. Contemporary critics, in comparison, would appreciate such offspring of The Hit as Gangster No. Few reviewers of the time cottoned to the film’s blend of the cool and the lofty. It was a strange hybrid-a London crime drama cum Spanish road movie-possibly doomed by its dislocatedness and disregard for genre rules. The year before, however, he had directed another audacious film, The Hit, which surprisingly bombed. Though commissioned for TV, M y Beautiful Laundrette was released theatrically, and it reestablished Frears as a man of the cinema. Having made his feature debut with Gumshoe in 1971, Frears had been working primarily in television, directing plays and films written by the likes of Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard, and Christopher Hampton, and characterized by adroit storytelling and visual economy. It was also the breakout film of the director, forty-four-year-old Stephen Frears. ![]() It announced Hanif Kureishi’s screenwriting career and made a star of Daniel Day-Lewis. The timeliest was My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), which married its interracial gay love story, set in South London’s Asian community, to a trenchant critique of the Thatcher era’s enterprise culture. Before the 1980s British film renaissance was curtailed by three ruinously expensive failures- Absolute Beginners, Revolution, and The Mission-it yielded a cluster of superb smaller movies, including Letter to Brezhnev, Caravaggio, and Mona Lisa. ![]()
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