General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Villain (1971 film)

Villain is a 1971 British crime film directed by Michael Tuchner, starring Richard Burton as the sadistic East End gang leader Vic Dakin, with Ian McShane and Nigel Davenport in supporting roles. It was adapted from James Barlow's 1968 crime novel The Burden of Proof by the television writing duo Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, with an adaptation credit for Al Lettieri, and the BFI places it alongside Get Carter as a landmark of the new wave of violent British gangster films of the early 1970s.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director	Michael Tuchner, for whom it was a first feature film after television work³
Source	James Barlow's 1968 novel The Burden of Proof; the working title was Burden of Proof³
Lead cast	Richard Burton (Vic Dakin), Ian McShane (Wolfe Lissner), Nigel Davenport (Rob Matthews)¹
Running time	98 minutes (BFI); AFI lists 90 or 97 minutes for different prints¹^•³
Release	New York and Los Angeles openings 26 May 1971; UK release 12 August 1971³^•⁴
Production	September to mid-November 1970 in London; Technicolor, Panavision; distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer³
Reception	67% Tomatometer from 12 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes; under-performed at the box office⁵^•⁴

Spoilers

Plot and character

Vic Dakin runs a prosperous protection racket for London businesses and has so far avoided arrest. He lives with his elderly mother (Cathleen Nesbitt), described in one synopsis as the only woman he can love, and maintains a possessive, violent relationship with Wolfe Lissner (Ian McShane), a small-time pimp and blackmailer who is also his occasional lover.⁶^•³ The film opens with Dakin brutally punishing Benny Thompson, an underling he suspects of informing to the police.³

The plot turns on a payroll robbery at a plastics factory. Although Dakin normally shies away from robbery, the promise of inside information and a payroll delivered in an ordinary car rather than an armored vehicle draws him in, and he enlists fellow crime boss Frank Fletcher (T. P. McKenna) and his ulcer-ridden brother-in-law Edgar Lowis (Joss Ackland). Inspector Rob Matthews of Scotland Yard (Nigel Davenport) is determined to catch Dakin in the act, and the robbery goes bloodily wrong, setting up a cat-and-mouse ending in which Dakin is betrayed by the man who tipped him off.³^•⁴

The character was modeled on the London gangster Ronnie Kray. The BFI's program note states that any resemblance between Vic Dakin and Ronnie Kray was quite deliberate, and TCM describes Dakin as a gay, overly violent East End gangster seemingly based on Kray.⁷^•⁴

Production

Producer Elliott Kastner had originally commissioned a treatment from the Hollywood actor-writer Al Lettieri, who later played Virgil Sollozzo in The Godfather; Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, then famed for the BBC series The Likely Lads, wrote the screenplay and were credited with making the London idioms work.⁸^•⁷ The film was a Kastner/Ladd/Kanter picture, produced by Alan Ladd Jr. and Jay Kanter for Winkast Film Productions in association with Anglo-EMI, presented by Nat Cohen, and shot at EMI M-G-M Elstree Studios and on location between September and mid-November 1970.³^•⁹

Burton's terms. According to a 1970 New York Times article, Richard Burton forewent his "celebrated $1,000,000 fee" to work for a percentage of the picture's profits; a later account puts his compensation in expenses at around $80,000.³^•⁷ Burton's star was declining in 1970 when the film went into production, and during the shoot he took a day off on 10 November 1970 to go to Buckingham Palace with Elizabeth Taylor and his sister Cicely to accept a CBE.⁴

Locations. The film was shot on location around London, including Arundel Gardens in Notting Hill, the Assembly House pub in Kentish Town, both Heathrow and Gatwick airports, York Mansions in Battersea, and the Nine Elms section. The robbery was filmed in Bracknell, at the Clark Easton glass factory on Ellesfield Avenue, and the finale used a derelict railway bridge in South Acton.⁴^•²

Release and reception

The film opened in New York and Los Angeles on 26 May 1971 and in the United Kingdom on 12 August 1971. For its U.S. release it was partially dubbed from the original version to help American audiences follow the strong British accents.³^•⁴

It under-performed at the box office, and the failure damaged Burton's ability to guarantee film financing. Vincent Canby of The New York Times described Burton as reading his lines "while keeping himself at a safe remove from them, as if he didn't want to be identified with the part," and called the film "an awful film, really."⁴ The Monthly Film Bulletin's 1971 review by Nigel Andrews found the story tidily plotted and the robbery brilliantly staged, but judged the film's violence and homosexuality a Seventies gloss on an old-fashioned, cosily humanist approach to the gangster genre.⁷

Standing in British crime cinema

The early 1970s saw an explosion of British crime cinema, and the BFI places Villain alongside Get Carter as a landmark of that wave, an "effective and brutal British noir that expertly captures the souring of 1960s optimism."² Unlike Get Carter, which enjoys a cult afterlife, Villain quickly vanished into late-night television airings, though the BFI Shop has described it as an intricate, graphically violent British counterpart to Get Carter and The French Connection that foreshadowed 1970s television police dramas such as The Sweeney.⁷^•¹⁰ Retrospective critics have been warmer than the 1971 press: a 2020 Guardian review called Burton's performance one of his best and judged the film easily as good as Get Carter, and on Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 67% Tomatometer from 12 reviews.⁸^•⁵ The film was released on Blu-ray by StudioCanal as part of its Vintage Classics collection.²

References

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