On Location: The South London of Alan Clarke’s… | Little White Lies

On Location

On Loca­tion: The South Lon­don of Alan Clarke’s The Firm

23 Jan 2021

Words by Adam Scovell

Man walking on pavement outside brick building. Grassy field with trees. Paved walkway among bushes. Silhouette of buildings against evening sky.
Man walking on pavement outside brick building. Grassy field with trees. Paved walkway among bushes. Silhouette of buildings against evening sky.
The British director’s con­tro­ver­sial foot­ball hooli­gan dra­ma makes great use of var­i­ous domes­tic locales.

Alan Clarke’s rela­tion­ship with the BBC arguably pro­duced one of the most impor­tant bod­ies of work in British cin­e­ma. A man whose film­mak­ing court­ed con­tro­ver­sy at almost every turn, the so-called Bres­son of Birken­head, as Andrew Collins once named him in The Guardian, dealt with all aspects of British soci­ety, often with uncom­fort­able honesty.

In doing so, Clarke ven­tured into spaces and places rarely shown in main­stream British cin­e­ma, find­ing visu­al dra­ma in explic­it­ly domes­tic locales. Clarke’s cin­e­ma is full of archi­tec­tur­al con­trasts, yet few of his films cap­ture the range of dif­fer­ent social class­es and places as effec­tive­ly as his con­tro­ver­sial dra­ma The Firm, made for the Screen Two anthol­o­gy series and broad­cast on 26 Feb­ru­ary, 1989.

The Firm is typ­i­cal in terms of Clarke’s lat­er work. It fol­lows a firm” of hooli­gans known as the Inter City Crew led by suc­cess­ful estate agent Bex (Gary Old­man), based on the infa­mous exploits of the Inter City Firm of West Ham fans in the sev­en­ties and eight­ies. They com­prise of groups of men who use foot­ball as an excuse for vio­lent brawls with oth­er firms, in par­tic­u­lar the Buc­ca­neers led by Yeti (Phil Davis). Their vio­lence and hedo­nism makes Fight Club look like a gen­tile outing.

With an upcom­ing sea­son in Europe, Bex is recruit­ing for an inter­na­tion­al firm to fight abroad in Hol­land. How­ev­er, there are argu­ments about who will lead it so Bex’s firm must prove they are wor­thy of the fight and take on both Yeti’s mob in South Lon­don as well as their oth­er rival firm in Birm­ing­ham. But how far will these men go to get their buzz from extreme vio­lence and will the respectable veneer of every­day life remain intact?

In spite of a brief excur­sion to Birm­ing­ham for the fight with Oboe (Andrew Wilde) and his mob, The Firm is a Lon­don film, or more specif­i­cal­ly a South Lon­don film. Clarke is explic­it in show­ing no bias as to where the men who par­take in such vio­lence roam, par­tic­u­lar­ly because he wants to show this sideshow to be run almost exclu­sive­ly by yup­pies and high­er earn­ers as opposed to the usu­al image of being a pre­dom­i­nant­ly work­ing-class preoccupation.

Expansive green field, with a large white mansion nestled atop a hill under a cloudy sky.

The film opens with Bex show­ing a rich cou­ple a huge prop­er­ty in Kid­brook Grove in Black­heath before cut­ting to a foot­ball match tak­ing place on Black­heath itself. All Saints church and the build­ings on Tal­bot Place are seen just as Yeti dri­ves his crew onto the pitch and inter­rupts the game. Vis­it­ing the area today, noth­ing has changed except per­haps for the weather.

The con­trast between rich and poor areas is almost con­stant through­out the film. Bex has a size­able income and owns his own house near the riv­er in Thames­mead while still drink­ing in the run-down booz­er in the estate, iron­i­cal­ly now a Chris­t­ian Cen­tre. No part of Lon­don is out of bounds to either the char­ac­ters or Clarke’s cam­era. Even dur­ing the trip to Birm­ing­ham lat­er on, that same con­trast between dif­fer­ent archi­tec­tures and areas is present, mov­ing between the Bull Ring and Oboe’s sub­ur­ban house where he has his eyes sliced with a Stan­ley knife in revenge for an attack made on ICC new­bie, Yusef (Ter­ry Sue-Patt).

The Firm is essen­tial­ly a film about pow­er. Clarke’s back cat­a­logue is full of films that deal expert­ly with this – both ver­sions of Scum in par­tic­u­lar – and he has shown him­self to have a keen eye for the set­tings of these high­ly tense dra­mas. The ten­sion arguably feels more pal­pa­ble because the loca­tions are so ordi­nary, exag­ger­at­ed fur­ther by the con­trast built between the actions of the char­ac­ters and their strange moments of polite conversation.

In between organ­is­ing fights in the liv­ing room, one man will take offence at not being offered a cup of tea. When in the mid­dle of anoth­er rant, verg­ing on explod­ing into vio­lence, Bex starts dis­cussing his A‑levels. All of the indi­ca­tions are that these are ordi­nary peo­ple, from their dia­logue to their hous­es. It’s only when they get togeth­er in groups that some­thing more ter­ri­fy­ing and pri­mal comes to the fore.

Brick building with trees, path of paving stones running alongside the building.

Bex’s house is a piv­otal loca­tion in the film, espe­cial­ly as it’s where the character’s home-life with Sue (Les­ley Manville) bril­liant­ly dis­in­te­grates, and so this was the main loca­tion cho­sen to vis­it. The house sits on Mal­lard Path not far from Plum­stead sta­tion, a road now entire­ly pedes­tri­anised, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to find. The road in the film is seen when Bex is exam­in­ing his van­dalised motor as his father looks on in dis­may; the house seen inside and out. It leads even­tu­al­ly to the under­pass where the police lat­er emerge to tell Sue the news of Bex’s final fight with Yeti.

It’s about belong­ing,” sug­gests one of the group in the film’s fourth-wall break finale, explain­ing why they do what they do. This is a film about mas­culin­i­ty in free fall; men who have every­thing that soci­ety tells them they need, and yet are still left with a dan­ger­ous lack of mean­ing in their lives. They have turned to the most bes­tial of plea­sures and it all occurred in the bland sub­ur­bia of the city, the streets all around us.

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