Croupier, Mike Hodges’ dark casino-set film, benefits from a spare, minimalistic score by Simon Fisher Turner with contributions to the underscore by Gilad Atzmon and Pete Rackham. A cult favourite, the film features a mesmerising performance by Clive Owen, says Selwyn Harris

Director Mike Hodges is undoubtedly best known for his debut, the seedy British gangster classic Get Carter (1971). His output since though has been patchy, apparently due to problems he’s faced regarding finance and distribution. But arguably it has also been down to a filmography lacking any clear sense of direction. That was up until Croupier (1998) when Hodges returned to the kind of dark, snidely decadent urban backdrop for which his debut film is best remembered. On Croupier Hodges is back to his very best.

Yet this oblique thriller completely passed by both the British critics and distributors on its initial release, coming on the back of a digitally remastered release of Get Carter. Surprisingly then it went on to become a big cult hit in America, subsequently receiving a much warmer reception on its UK re-release in 2001. Fat royalty cheques began to roll in for a director now in his seventies and contentedly resigned to growing vegetables in his garden in Dorset. But the film’s an artistic as well as commercial triumph for Hodges.

As in Get Carter, Croupier has its fair share of morally dubious characters, an underworld-by-lamplight tension and an atmospheric jazz score that sets the scene. But it’s a different animal to the Michael Caine vehicle, a more sophisticated, enigmatic one. For the sake of argument it’s a thriller, but it owes more to European existentialist art house cinema than it does to American film noir.

Centred on a London casino, the actor Clive Owen (who went on to play the leading role again for Hodges in his engrossing 2003 gangster-revisit I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead) plays cynical, out-of-work novelist Jack Manfred. A meeting with a publisher who’s obsessed with books about celebrity leaves Jack thoroughly disillusioned. So when his father – a self-serving wheeler-dealer who Jack obviously despises – phones all the way from his home in South Africa and sets him up for a job as a croupier in a London casino, he reluctantly goes along with it. Rubbing shoulders with an array of characters in the casino stimulates Jack’s creative juices and he invents an alter ego, “Jake” the croupier, who is able to separate himself from the winners and losers in life by becoming a “detached voyeur”.

A novel begins to write itself in his head, in the film relayed by a brilliantly wry voice-over commentary narrated by Clive Owen. Jack finds a protagonist for his book, Matt, another casino dealer and a jack-the-lad, whose philosophy is to “fuck the whole world over.” Jack’s first draft of his “amoral” novel and his nightly comings-and-goings upset his “romantic” live-in girlfriend Marion, played by Gina McKee. When she asks Jack if he loves her, he replies that she’s his “conscience”. “Haven’t you got one of your own?” responds Marion incredulously. Jack is adamant that his book reflects reality; Ernest Hemingway seems like his preferred model as he quotes him more than once: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong in the broken places.” But the world doesn’t break “Jake” who never lets anything get to him, and even some dramatic twists in the tale don’t stop his ironic, detached alter ego from eventually taking over his life.

The terse script is full of wonderfully short sharp ironic sentences. It was written by former Nicholas Roeg (The Man who Fell to Earth) collaborator Paul Mayersberg. It also recalls Hemingway as well as hinting at film noir parody but is entirely contemporary. It’s mainly this, but also the claustrophobic filming and the tension in Clive Owen’s excellent frigid, narcissistic character portrayal that gives the film such a strong identity. 

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