The genius of "The Krays," Peter Medak's new film about the most notorious villains of modern British crime, is that the movie is not simply a catalog of stabbings, garrotings and bloodletting. It goes deeper than into the twisted pathology of twins whose faces would light up with joy when their mom told them they looked just like proper gentlemen.
Reggie and Ronnie, their names were. Ronnie was the instigator, the one who got off on killing, and Reggie was the weaker one who killed only once, under Ronnie's insistent pressure, but at the time there was nothing to choose between them: They were the two most feared men in the East End. And their mother, Violet, was treated very, very nicely, wherever she went.
"She was the most important love interest in their lives," Billie Whitelaw was musing one afternoon after the movie's North American premiere. Whitelaw is the distinguished British actress who is known as the foremost interpreter of the works of Samuel Beckett, and she plays Mother Kray in the movie. It's quite a performance.
"Violet was just as well-known as the twins," she said, "but for different reasons. She was a classic East End mother figure. And the whole focus of the movie is domestic. Violet and her boys. There's a most horrific film to be made about the Krays, because what Peter Medak has done is just the tip of the iceberg of the atrocities they committed. If you wanted to make a gory horror movie out of the Krays, it's all there to make. But Peter has actually made a domestic film about a mother and her two sons." In "The Krays" (opening Friday in Chicago at the Fine Arts), Violet cheerfully rules her husband; her other son, Charlie, and all the neighbors and relatives. She's a forcible, opinionated, strong-willed woman who knows when she holds her twins for the first time that they're destined to be special. As children, they were mean and violent, and forged a strange bond of twinship that distrusted the rest of the world - except for Violet. She could see no evil in them.
She doted even on their "business," which all London knew was extortion.
In the film, the Krays are played by brothers, Gary and Martin Kemp, whose sleek, good looks seem right at home in expensive suits and polished shoes. Their performances suggest an eerie quality to the twins - the notion that they are never entirely offstage, that everything they say is for effect, sometimes ironic effect, and that they are never more dangerous than when their oily politeness is on display.
Whitelaw knew the twins at height of their powers. "I was working at the Theatre Workshop with Joan Littlewood," Whitelaw remembered, "and they were around then. They actually offered Joan protection, but I think it was a courteous, nice protection. They loved theatricals." And yet the protection they were offering, I said, was basically protection against themselves.
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