Truly Dyer: The brutal, boozy brilliance of the British football hooligan movie

It used to be open season among film critics when it came to football hooligan movies. The violent attack endured by Danny Dyer in the opening images of Nick Love’s The Football Factory (2004) was nothing compared to the verbal punishment metered out on it by broadsheet reviewers. Likewise, Lexi Alexander’s Green Street Hooligans (2005), its star Charlie Hunnam coshed repeatedly by critics for having the worst East End accent since Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

Hooligan pictures have long been castigated for their misogyny and mindless violence. “Irresponsible, ill-timed and risible,” fulminated The Guardian about The Football Factory. “Staggeringly appalling” and “a colossal misstep at every turn” were among the responses from British reviewers to Green Street Hooligans. “A redundant compendium of blokeish clichés,” sneered the Daily Mail about the 2009 remake of Gary Oldman’s hooligan movie The Firm. The same reporter described the genre as a whole as “worthless”, and one that could only appeal to the “mentally infirm.”

Most of these films did patchy business at the box office, but subsequently became huge successes on DVD. They came out in the UK at a time when lads’ mags were selling in their droves. Many of their characters – played by the likes of genre stalwarts Dyer, Tamer Hassan and Leo Gregory – became cult figures. There was an obvious overlap between the hooligan pictures of the era and a new wave of low-budget British gangster movies led by films such as Essex Boys (2000) and Rise of the Footsoldier (2007), many of which were equally detested by mainstream critics. These films in turn spawned a sub-genre of TV documentaries, several fronted by Dyer, about the “real football factories” of the UK, as well as Britain’s “hardest” or “deadliest” men.

When Nick Nevern (who himself had starred in 2012’s The Rise and Fall of a White Collar Hooligan and its sequels) made a comedy, The Hooligan Factory (2014), it quickly became apparent that the genre was spoof-proof. The films Nevern was lampooning were – in the eyes of their detractors, at least – so preposterous already that there was no point in mocking them. In The Hooligan Factory, Dex, Bullet, Midnight, Slasher, Trumpet and Weasel (self-respecting hooligans always have nicknames) get involved in predictable aggro with rival “firms” of hooligans. In breaks from the football-related violence, some of it involving East Anglian tractors, they enjoy themselves with “the pills and the clubs, the birds and the booze, the torture and the tracksuits.”

Now, almost 20 years after their heyday, the long-derided hooligan movie is at last in sight of critical respectability. The Football Factory will be shown next month at London’s BFI Southbank as part of “Acting Hard”, a season of films exploring representations of working-class masculinity in British cinema, from the Thatcher era to the present day. Danny Dyer will be appearing on stage to discuss his career with the season curator, Nia Childs.

She tells me she understands if some might question the season. “As a feminist woman, the way I’m thinking about things is always in a feminist sense and I totally get that Football Factory might challenge some of those ideas,” she says. Nonetheless, when Childs watched the film again recently, she was struck by its similarity to the work of Shane Meadows, of This Is England fame. Work by Meadows also features in the season, but his films tend to get much better reviews than those by Nick Love. “Part of having [The Football Factory] in the season and having it at the BFI, which is a respected institution, is asking people to say: hang on a minute, maybe it does need another look.”

Former EastEnders star Dyer continues to divide opinion. Some see him as a versatile and charismatic actor, and good enough to earn the respect and friendship of Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. Others regard him as a posturing “geezer” whose films – to quote film critic Mark Kermode – are “leery, laddy, dreary nonsense.”

Childs argues that Dyer remains woefully underrated as an actor because viewers identify him too closely with the characters he plays. “There is an inherent snobbery in our society around people who maybe don’t fit the idea of a working-class person we deem acceptable,” she says. “The thing about Danny is that he is a lad and he’s of a time when he was very publicly drinking and taking drugs. He became a bit of a poster boy for a kind of hedonism that we might look back on negatively now for various reasons. But I do think he is exceptionally talented.”

At the same time that films such as The Football Factory were being pilloried, Ken Loach’s dramas about working-class life were being praised to the hilt and winning festival awards. Middle-class critics loved them. “If you look at the films [Loach] was making in the 1990s and early 2000s, a lot of [their] characters were quite similar to the characters Danny Dyer is playing,” Childs says, citing features like Riff-Raff (1991) and Raining Stones (1993). She believes Loach’s protagonists have become “more respectable” in recent years. “He would say ‘I don’t want to show working-class characters doing bad things because I want to counter society’s view of working-class people’, whereas I think Nick Love would say ‘I don’t give a s***.’ I think Nick Love makes films for working-class people as well.”

The season promises to expose a continuing class prejudice within British film culture that goes back a very long way. The same disdain shown by reviewers to Dyer’s character Tommy Johnson in The Football Factory was matched by the contempt displayed toward the “spivs” and “West End wide boys” in their cheap suits and shiny shoes who used to pop up in British films of the late 1940s and early 1950s – characters like Richard Attenborough’s razor-wielding delinquent Pinkie Brown in the Boulting brothers’ adaptation of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1948). Or the “young horror” as called by the newspaper The Sketch – the petty criminal played by Dirk Bogarde who kills PC Dixon in Ealing drama, The Blue Lamp (1950).

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a hooligan,” the would-be thug in The Hooligan Factory tells the audience early on in his voiceover. It’s a very knowing reference. Directors of football hooligan movies have two main influences. One is Martin Scorsese’s gangster films, especially Goodfellas (which opens with Ray Liotta’s “as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”) and his period epic Gangs of New York (2002). The others are the films and TV plays made by Alan Clarke, featuring young actors like Tim Roth (as the skinhead in Made in Britain in 1982), Ray Winstone (the borstal kid in the television and big screen versions of Scum in 1977 and 1979) and Gary Oldman. Clarke’s original version of The Firm (1989), in which Oldman stars as Bexy, a married London estate agent and football thug, remains the Godfather of all football hooligan films – the one which every successor cowers in front of.

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It’s easy to see why Clarke was considered such an inspirational figure. His films were energetically made and often darkly funny, featuring bravura performances from their young leads and with perceptive points to make about why their disaffected male heroes were so drawn toward violence on the terraces and beyond.

US author Bill Buford’s 1990 book, Among the Thugs (which Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren once tried to make into a film), has a wonderfully vivid, surrealistic description of its author standing on a deserted British railway platform when, suddenly, an unscheduled train full of football supporters comes whistling by. It was a “football special” carrying Liverpool fans home on a Saturday evening. The fans were chanting violently. “A minute before there had been virtual silence: a misty sleepy Welsh winter evening. And then this song pounded out with increasing ferocity,” Buford writes of the supporters who, en masse, were “in the position to do anything they wanted.” The train left and the silence returned. Buford was so fascinated by the destruction the fans left in their wake that he began to investigate further and spent years attending football matches with the thugs.

“I had not expected the violence to be so pleasurable… why do young males riot every Saturday? They do it for the same reason that another generation drank too much, or smoked dope, or took hallucinogenic drugs, or behaved badly or rebelliously. Violence is their antisocial kick,” Buford eventually concluded.

The best hooligan movies give viewers the same adrenalin rush that Buford first experienced on that deserted railway platform – before making them question why they’re finding the aggro so intoxicating. Phil Davis, who co-starred in Clarke’s The Firm, went on to direct the equally impressive I.D. (1995), in which Reece Dinsdale played an undercover cop who infiltrates a London football firm. Exhilarated by his experiences, he ends up joining in for real, in spite of the gang’s virulently racist and right-wing views. This was a sly and subversive film which turned audience expectations on their head.

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There have been recent reports of growing crowd trouble at football grounds. “Bad old days of football hooligans back as cocaine fuelling stadium violence,” warned The Mirror last year. It wouldn’t be a surprise if filmmakers pick up on this and make further hooligan movies. Any new pictures will probably be treated by critics with the same hostility as their predecessors. Nonetheless, some believe that these movies touched audiences in a way that more earnest social realist dramas simply don’t.

Now, The Football Factory is screening within the hallowed confines of the BFI Southbank amid talks that director Nick Love is planning a sequel. The original film’s producer Rupert Preston tells me that it’s the best-selling indie film on DVD in UK cinema history in spite of it facing rampant piracy issues.

“It connected with a huge mainstream audience,” Preston says. “It was a studio-level blockbuster hit. There weren’t other films being made for that audience in a way. It was viscerally exciting with great dialogue… and Danny Dyer in the lead… it’s now a cult movie, an evergreen. Young audiences are still discovering it.” Preston’s 20-year-old nephew discovered it via TikTok and became an instant fan.

What about the dodgy gender politics, the glorification of violence, the unreconstructed views on masculinity and the redundant references to D-Day and Winston Churchill? Preston won’t be drawn on such issues. The best football hooligan stories on screen, he says, aren’t “preaching” to their audience – they’re simply “giving them a film that they enjoy.”

“Acting Hard” runs at BFI Southbank from 1 September to 2 October. Special events will include Danny Dyer in conversation on 25 September, with season curator Nia Childs