General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Criminal

The Criminal (also released as The Concrete Jungle) is a 1960 British black-and-white crime film directed by Joseph Losey, starring Stanley Baker as the career criminal Johnny Bannion, with Sam Wanamaker, Margit Saad, and Patrick Magee in supporting roles. It splits its action evenly between the outside world and prison, following Bannion through a racetrack robbery, a return to prison, and pressure from both a sadistic warder and an underworld kingpin to reveal where he has hidden the loot.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	Joseph Losey; produced by Jack Greenwood¹
Writers	Alun Owen and Jimmy Sangster³
Lead cast	Stanley Baker (Johnny Bannion), Sam Wanamaker (Mike Carter), Margit Saad (Suzanne), Patrick Magee (Chief Warden Barrows), Grégoire Aslan (Frank Saffron)⁴
Running time	97 minutes (BFI); the 1960 cinema version classified by the BBFC ran 98m 0s¹^•⁵
Key creatives	Cinematography Robert Krasker (black and white); music John Dankworth, with Cleo Laine singing "Thieving Boy"³^•⁶
UK classification	Classified 27 May 1960 by the BBFC with cuts; distributor Anglo Amalgamated⁵
Alternate title	The Concrete Jungle²

Spoilers

Plot

Johnny Bannion, a career criminal, is master of his cell block as the film opens, although another convict, Frank Saffron, controls the prison together with Chief Warden Barrows. Once out, Bannion pulls off a racetrack heist, but Maggie, an ex-girlfriend consumed by jealousy, informs the police of his crime, and, having hidden the stolen cash in a field, he receives a 15-year sentence that returns him behind bars. His former colleague Mike Carter kidnaps Bannion's new girlfriend Suzanne and pressures him into a deal with Saffron: escape in exchange for the money. Inside prison, Bannion is efficient and can cope; outside, he is hopelessly trapped within a greedy, materialistic society, and the film leaves him as it started, utterly confused.⁴ The gang resorts to using other prisoners and a staged riot to drive the uncooperative Bannion to give up the loot's location.²

Production

The project originated as a Hammer Films production with a screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, who wrote many of Hammer's horror classics over the following decade. Losey dismissed the original script as a rehash of Hollywood prison-movie clichés and commissioned Alun Owen, a writer with a gift for vernacular dialogue who later penned the Oscar-nominated screenplay for A Hard Day's Night (1964), to give the script a more focused British emphasis.⁷^•²

Research and realism. Through Stanley Baker, Losey recruited several released criminals to share their experiences and toured numerous British prison facilities, which influenced everything from the dialogue to the construction of the prison set, based on the interior of an old Victorian jail. One of the main inspirations during his research was "Dimes," a formidable real-life racetrack criminal given to flashy, expensive cars and clothes, who earned a fearsome reputation after a bloody ten-minute knife fight in central London with a rival crime lord. Bannion was based on this figure.²^•⁴

Style and themes

Scriptwriter Alun Owen, assisted by Losey, moved the British crime film further in the direction of presenting prison life as a metaphor for a materialistic, oppressive society, dramatizing the transformation of crime from the realm of the individual criminal to the operations of large-scale organizations.⁴ Critics have read Bannion as an existential loner caught between two complementary systems: the sadistic chief warder, who feeds his sense of power by fomenting a dog-eat-dog code in the cells, and the underworld kingpin waiting outside to kill him and hijack his stashed loot.⁸

Losey's visual style in the film leans toward the expressionistic, and his concern for social outsiders and injustice, already apparent in his earlier British crime dramas Time Without Pity (1957) and Blind Date (1959), is on display here.⁹ Cinematographer Robert Krasker, known for The Third Man, captured both the stark theatricality of prison life and bleak winter landscapes, while Losey and Krasker used the prison's spaces deliberately, from the full depth of the cellblock to the claustrophobia of individual cells.⁶^•¹⁰ Even where physical violence is minimal, Losey uses the sound of a riot to feed a mounting oppression that mirrors Bannion's psychological turmoil.¹⁰

Music

The score by the British jazz composer John Dankworth marks the first of five collaborations between Losey, a passionate lover of jazz, and Dankworth. Dankworth's wife, the singer Cleo Laine, performs the recurring melancholy ballad "Thieving Boy," which underscores the film's sense of Bannion being trapped even outside prison walls.⁶^•¹⁰

Release and reception

The film was distributed by Anglo Amalgamated and classified by the British Board of Film Censors on 27 May 1960 at 98 minutes, receiving cuts as part of the classification process.⁵ Its release was overshadowed by Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which came out the same day; that film, one of the taboo-breaking "kitchen sink" dramas, dropped the cover of crime or thriller plots to openly express the disaffection of young working-class men who rejected the gentility and middle-class values dominating British cultural life.⁷

Later assessments have been favorable. Time Out called it "jaggedly explosive and visually brilliant, a million miles beyond other British crime movies," crediting Losey's American eye and expertise.⁸ A retrospective review notes that Losey was at pains to recreate prison life in detail, giving a palpable sense of the prison hierarchy, and judges the film long-reaching in its influence on later depictions of prison set-ups.¹⁰ The Irish News described it as a low-key masterclass in crime storytelling whose outside sequences come close to the best of the French New Wave.¹¹

Place in Losey's career

Losey was an American director driven out of the United States by McCarthyism who settled in England, where he made all his subsequent films; The Criminal was one of the strongest examples of the piercing, usually pseudonymous British dramas with which he built his international reputation before his career-defining collaborations with Dirk Bogarde and Harold Pinter.¹²^•² It was the last of his crime dramas, and it featured Stanley Baker, who with Bogarde was central to Losey's 1960s output.⁷^•⁹ The film has since been released on home entertainment several times in the UK, including versions classified in 1991, 1996, and 2008, the last at 92m 38s for physical media and video on demand.⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1960s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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