London after dark: Sixties cinema and its fixation with the city’s dangerous undertones

There is a very creepy moment early on in Edgar Wright’s new film, Last Night in Soho. Young fashion student Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) has just arrived in London for the first time. Her excitement is unbounded. Growing up in Redruth, she has always dreamed of coming to the big city. Then she catches a taxi. The lecherous driver bears more than a passing resemblance to John Worboys, the “black cab rapist”. She has only been in his car for a few moments when he makes a move on her.

This is Wright’s way of saying that, in central London, for a newcomer like Eloise, danger lurks on every corner. The distinguished-looking, silver-haired old man who props up the bar in the Toucan pub in Soho might be a killer. The eccentric landlady could be harbouring murderous secrets. The glamorous singer with the flowing blonde hair is probably a working girl with a pimp who beats her up.

Wright’s film is set in both the present day and in the swinging London of the Sixties. The city has changed hugely over the last 60 years but, even today, the seediness, poverty and menace remain. “It’s a district that I love and sometimes fear,” Wright says of the area. “The 1960s casts a long shadow on Soho and I’ve long been fascinated with the films of the period that peek into the darker corners of central London nightlife.”

Wright has now curated a season of those films, London After Dark, at the BFI, which commences after Last Night in Soho’s gala screening at the London Film Festival.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) is one of the first titles that Wright chose. This is a movie that confounds Hitchcock lovers. It’s a deeply personal project, Hitch’s first feature back home in London in more than 20 years. Returning to old haunts like Soho, Covent Garden and Tower Bridge energised the obese and ancient director. His previous two features, Torn Curtain and Topaz, had been expensive flops in which he had appeared to be going through the motions. In Frenzy, though, the old master, back on home turf, rediscovered his touch.

Just as in his earliest London-set movies like The Lodger, Murder and Blackmail, Hitchcock was dealing with a very macabre subject matter. This is a story about a serial killer who gets his kicks from strangling women to death. However, the director was now making his film in the permissive era of Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange. He took voyeuristic pleasure in the violence he was now able to depict directly rather than simply imply.

“Frenzy is the story of a man who is impotent and therefore expresses himself through murder,” the director described his new film. As one of his biographers, Donald Spoto, notes, this was “a strange logic, or one that perhaps made sense only to Hitchcock”.

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Violence seemed to be taken for granted in Hitchcock’s London, as much a part of everyday life as traffic jams and bad weather. You can’t help but be struck by the matter of fact way the crowd at the start of the film react to seeing a naked woman’s corpse washed up on the banks of the Thames. “It’s another necktie murder,” they murmur as if beached dead bodies are a regular occurrence on this particular stretch of the river. They strain to get a glimpse of her, completely ignoring the pompous local politician giving a speech about cleaning up pollution. “I say, it’s not my club tie, is it?” the politician grumbles when he finally glimpses the body.

If this is an exercise in nostalgia, it is a very twisted one. Hitchcock portrays a world of casual misogyny and continual low-level aggression towards women. It is taken for granted that female bar staff will be sexually harassed both by the publicans and their punters. “He rapes ’em first,” a Covent Garden barmaid describes the killer’s modus operandi. ”It’s nice to know every cloud had a silver lining,” her upper-class customer responds. “We haven’t had a good juicy series of murders since Christie and they’re so good for the tourist trade.”

With this kind of dialogue, it’s a surprise that the film hasn’t long since been cancelled. Hitchcock’s own family were reportedly appalled by it. This, though, isn’t just a lurid story about a psychotic killer. It’s a piece of social history too. Hitchcock captured a vanished world, a London where fruit and veg rather than tourist trinkets were still being sold in Covent Garden, where the pubs were full to bursting point every lunchtime and where diners in even the smartest restaurants smoked cigarettes between courses.

Frenzy shows a city full of lonely men and women trying but failing to strike up relationships. One of them, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) is surely the director’s most repulsive villain. The point, though, is that Bob seems remarkably ordinary – a cheeky salesman with the gift of the gab. As in so many Hitchcock thrillers, suspicion falls on the wrong man. To police eyes, Dick Blaney (Jon Finch), the embittered, hard-drinking ex-RAF officer fallen on hard times, is a far more likely candidate to be the strangler than his friend, Bob. In Edgar Wright’s film likewise, the killers are rarely the ones you expect.

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Michael Powell’s masterpiecePeeping Tom (1960), about a gentle oddball in a duffel coat who photographs the women he murders at the moment of their death, is another film in Wright’s “after dark” season. In the early 1960s, the critics were appalled by Peeping Tom’s storyline. “From its slumbering, mildly salacious beginning to its appallingly masochistic and deprived climax, it is wholly evil,” Nina Hibbin wrote in The Daily Worker. “Flush it down the nearest sewer,” the Tribune’s Derek Hill famously suggested.

Wright, though, sees beyond the plotline to Powell’s formal brilliance. He is clearly fascinated by where Peeping Tom was shot. Two of Powell’s most prominent Fitzrovia locations, Newman Passage (the alleyway where the first murder takes place) and the nearby newsagent on the corner of Rathbone Place, also feature prominently in Last Night in Soho.

“The premise is attempting to show a Sixties film through a contemporary lens,” Wright says of his own movie. “I had real love for films of that period, Peeping Tom being one of them… I seem bizarrely obsessed with decades I did not exist in. I was born in 1974.”

Wright’s BFI season includes such rarities as West End Jungle, The Pleasure Girls, Primitive London, and The Small World of Sammy Lee, all pictures that show Sixties Soho in a shady and often squalid light. They tend to have unlikely moments of grace and lyricism, though.

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Sammy Lee starts with a haunting, beautifully shot sequence showing the empty Soho streets at dawn as the cleaners go about their business and mournful music plays on the soundtrack. Sammy (Anthony Newley), the debt-ridden, poker-playing strip club host who loves to schmooze, is very similar to the equally charming ne’er do well played by Matt Smith in the Sixties sections of Wright’s movie. Patsy (Julia Foster), the innocent young woman just arrived in town, has the same vulnerable quality as the young heroine Eloise in Last Night in Soho.

Primitive London (1965) is a documentary/exploitation pic about the decadence of London’s emerging youth culture. It profiles mods, strippers, nightclub dancers, beatniks and rockers – and has some scenes of wrestlers thrown in for good measure. A voiceover explains its subjects’ behaviour in earnest, sociological language but the real point of the movie is to include plenty of flashes of nudity along the way.

Other selections in Wright’s BFI season show youth rebellion (Beat Girl) and prostitution (Passport to Shame). Again and again, they deal with impressionable, idealistic young women who move to the big city only to see their dreams turn to dust.

Wright has chosen mainly B-movies, but bigger budget movies from the era were also exploring the seamy and violent side of Swinging London, both in Soho and across the city. With alcohol, drugs and sex to fuel them, characters from all walks of life were thrown together into the same melting pot with predictably combustible results. Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance, Joseph Losey’s The Servant and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion all exposed the fissures and tensions as class barriers broke down.

Of course, the promise of danger is the attraction of London “after dark”. As Last Night in Soho shows, and as Wright’s selection of Sixties movies reminds us, there has only ever been the thinnest of lines between the surface glamour of Soho nightlife and the squalor and depravity hiding behind it.

‘Last Night in Soho’ is a gala screening at the London Film Festival, 6-17 October

Edgar Wright’s London After Dark season takes place at BFI Southbank from 18 Oct –29 November