RED RIDING - 1980 - Arguably the best of the trilogy

Peter Hunter: You don't like the police much, do you?

Martin Laws: No love lost, no.

Peter Hunter: So when someone kicks down your front door, kills the dog and rapes the wife, who you gonna call?

Martin Laws: Well it certainly wouldn't be the West Yorkshire Police - they'd already *be* in there, wouldn't they.

RED RIDING: 1980 is perhaps the best in the trilogy of Channel 4 films, in that it has both the best of the lead performances (Paddy Considine as Peter Hunter), the most thematically dark and obscure material, and the best direction. The film opens with the West Yorkshire police under pressure from the public for not finding the Yorkshire Ripper - a serial killer who preys on whores. Hunter is brought in to investigate the Ripper case, but to covertly investigate corruption in the West Yorkshire police. Rozzers who were in the minor leagues in 1974 have now risen to positions of power in 1980 and will be even more ruthless in the attempt to protect the status quo. Hunter's case rest on tip-offs from BJ - a male prostitute - and the insane ramblings of former Yorkshire Post journo Jack Whitehead - both of whom believe that the Ripper murders are being used to cover up non-Ripper murders.

The strength of the material is its willingness to deal in endemic corruption. The idea that you cannot escape from the evil, even when you have uncovered the truth, continues. The impotence of all good men is the tragedy. Paddy Considine is always impressive and nowhere more so than here: conveying both Hunter's ambition and earnest good intentions, but also his flaws and vulnerability. Just as Eddie Dunford, Hunter is no saint. I particularly liked David Morrissey in the increasingly important role of bent copper Maurice Jobson. As villains, Joseph Mawle and Sean Harris impress as the Ripper and copper Bob Craven respectively.

Acting aside, what raises this film above its predecessor is the shooting style. British director, James Marsh (MAN ON WIRE, THE KING), conveys a sense of claustrophobia and moral quagmire through the way he frames and lights his characters. DP Igor Martinovic's use of technoscope is inspired, because it gives the grainy feel of the 16mm DV used on 1974, but without the hazy dream-like quality. The lines are more defined and precise, which makes sense in a chapter where we are starting to see the truth more clearly, but are still helpless to make it stop.

The only flaw is the soft-pedalling on the sexual and verbal brutality seen in the novels. Which is not to say that this film is anything other than dark and disturbing. Nonetheless, as in 1974, our eyes are spared the worst of it. Worst of all, as in 1974, there seems to be a need to foreground a romance - this time between Hunter and his assisting policewoman Helen Marshall - out of proportion to its importance in 1980, the novel. The continuing foregrounding of the relationship also detracts from the power of the final revelation in the novel. As in 1974, the complexity of the final chapters is significantly reduced to tie in with the simpler ending in 1974 and to keep the story moving, presumably. I feel that this is to the film's detriment.

Despite these flaws, one has to be thankful that something this dark and subversive made it on to our screens at all, not least with the resources of first-rate casting and direction. But before I sign off, a few words on the producers decision not to shoot the novel 1977. You can, sort of, see their logic because Hunter will investigate, in 1980, the same crimes being investigated by Jack Whitehead in 1977. The problem is that if you just have Hunter investigate in 1980, and then the opening revelations in 1983, the motivations of the police come a little out of the blue. Whereas 1977 goes right to the heart of the money motive and the sheer scale of the police corruption at the heart of the novels.

1980 was first shown on British TV in 2009 and is available both on DVD and on Channel 4's video on demand service.

RED RIDING - 1974 - Less slippery and subversive than the novel but well put together nonetheless

1974 is the first of three films produced for television by Britain's Channel 4, based on the "Yorkshire noir" novels of David Peace. Each of his four books, 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983, is about the corruption of policeman, priests, politicians and businessmen who murder and extort for no reason other than that they can. There never seems to be much money or success to be had from it, other than protecting the status quo. These crimes are posited as endemic in a region crippled with obsolete heavy industry and chippy toward outsiders. The greatest tragedy is to think you can remain an outsider - a cool observer - and that you can affect change. West Yorkshire is a law unto itself, and that law is policed by West Yorkshire's Finest, and spun by the compliant journalists of the Yorkshire Post. David Peace's world is one of almost complete corruption and casual evil. There are no heroes, but there are characters through whom we investigate the world and with whom we come to empathise.

In 1974, that character is a cocky young journalist called Eddie Dunford, newly back from a failed stint as a journo in Fleet Street, and desperate to make a name for himself by proving that someone is serially killing little girls despite the obfuscation of the rozzers; competition from senior crime reporter Jack Whitehead; and the powerful forces protecting a successful local property developer, John Dawson.

The movie is directed by Julian Jarrold, whose previous directorial efforts included the painfully superficial and hi-gloss remake of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED. 1974 is a far more successful film. Shot in sepia tones through the perpetual haze of cigarette smoke, the movie feels claustrophobic and sinister - just as it should. There's a superb scene where the camera looks over Dunford's shoulder through the patterned glass to a distorted image of Paula Garland - mother to a murdered girl - and soon to be Dunford's lover. That sums up Dunford: he sees through a glass darkly. And the tragedy of the film is that his eventual knowledge brings no relief. In a pivotal scene, he hands over a bag of documents - the research of his dead colleague Barry Gannon - to the one policeman he thinks is honest. Dunford is relieved - elated - as he drives toward his lover for an escape to the South. What a fool, the film-makers say, to think that he could actually escape the clutches of Yorkshire corruption. What a selfish, naive fool to think he could dump the files and fuck of to the South, where the sun shines.

Andrew Garfield is superb as Dunford - with his performance in THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS - he has become an actor I will go out of my way to watch. Rebecca Hall is moving as his lover, Paula Garland. In John Dawson, Sean Bean finds yet another role that capitalises on his slightly sleazy charisma. But the real strength is the depth and quality of British character actors filling the cast, from John Henshaw as the harsh-but-fair Editor, to Peter Mullan's Reverend Laws.

The resulting film is atmospheric, sometimes like a bad dream, hard to hold on to, unnverving, and very hard to let go of. Tony Grisoni has done a good job in adapting a ferociously complicated novel for a hundred minute runtime, and cleverly compresses characters. What the film looses, however, is the sheer force of its brutality. The novel is hard work, both in terms of language and descriptions of violence and sex. Every time Julian Jarrold cuts away from a blackmail photo or pans away from a scene of torture, David Peace takes you into the mind of the aggressor. And where the worst crime Grisoni's Dunford can be accused of is naivety, and a final loss of temper, Peace's Dunford is a far more ambivalent character. If policemen casually rape whores, then in the novel Dunford treats women as casually and cruelly, though playing, as it were, in the minor leagues.

And, without ruining either, I found the "solution" of 1974 and the closing scenes too neat and twee, where they should've been more slippery and open-ended. Presumably this was the result of the compression of a large conspiracy into a single culprit but the result was that the ending felt rushed and just plain bizarre - the logic behind the killing was almost given as a throw-away line, and significantly undermines the slow build-up.

RED RIDING was shown on UK TV in 2009 and is available on DVD and on the Channel 4 4oD video on demand service.