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The Hit (1984) 
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087414/

The Hit is a 1984 feature film directed by Stephen Frears and starring John Hurt, Terence Stamp and Tim Roth. The Hit was Stamp's first starring role in over a decade and Roth won an Evening Standard award as the apprentice hit man.

Ex-gangster Willie Parker has betrayed his former colleagues and now lives in Spain where he thinks he can hide from their vengeance. But one day, ten years later, two hitmen (Braddock and Myron) show up and kidnap Willie. They are ordered to escort him back to Paris where he should stand trial. 

  John Hurt  ...  Braddock  
  Terence Stamp  ...  Willie Parker  
  Tim Roth  ...  Myron  
  Laura del Sol  ...  Maggie  
  Bill Hunter  ...  Harry  
  Fernando Rey  ...  Senior policeman  
  Freddie Stuart  ...  First Man  
  Ralph Brown  ...  Second Man  
  A.J. Clarke  ...  Third Man  
  Lennie Peters  ...  Mr. Corrigan  
  Bernie Searle  ...  Hopwood (as Bernie Searl)  
  Brian Royal  ...  Fellows  
  Albie Woodington  ...  Riordan  
  Willoughby Gray  ...  Judge  
  Jim Broadbent  ...  Barrister  

Having made his feature debut with Gumshoe in 1971, Stephen Frears had been working primarily in television, directing plays and films written by the likes of Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard, and Christopher Hampton, and characterized by adroit storytelling and visual economy. Though commissioned for TV, My Beautiful Laundrette was released theatrically, and it reestablished Frears as a man of the cinema. The year before, however, he had directed another audacious film, The Hit, which surprisingly bombed. It was a strange hybrid—a London crime drama cum Spanish road movie—possibly doomed by its dislocatedness and disregard for genre rules. Few reviewers of the time cottoned to the film’s blend of the cool and the lofty. Contemporary critics, in comparison, would appreciate such offspring of The Hit as Gangster No. 1, Sexy Beast, and In Bruges, and the stateside equivalents made by the Coen brothers and Quentin Tarantino.

A handful of films have mythicized British gangland since its sixties heyday. Michael Caine famously told Bob Hoskins, There are three good British gangster films. I was in one [Get Carter], you were in one [The Long Good Friday], and we were both in the other [Mona Lisa]. On a different plane, Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance deconstructed the genre by sending its Ronnie Kray–like protagonist (James Fox) to the Chelsea refuge of a rock star (Mick Jagger), where class and sexual boundaries evaporate. The Hit subverted it in other ways, removing its villains to another alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as Braddock and Myron ferry Willie along the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains.

Frears and Prince were surely influenced by sixties and seventies road movies like Roeg’s Walkabout and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point and The Passenger, which used desert backdrops to highlight their characters’ alienation. In directing The Passenger, Julian Petley has written, Antonioni attempted to “transform the narrative codes within which he is working to turn them against themselves.” Frears did this—if less elliptically than Antonioni—by eschewing car chases, gunfights, and sex, by blurring the traditional roles of captive and captor, by poeticizing a story that germinates in baseness, and by focusing on a hero who finally lets down the audience. In manipulating the tenets of the gangster film, the western, the road movie, and even film noir (fatalism thrives in sunshine as well as rain), Frears questions their validity. And although The Hit is full of incident, it dwells on the internal life rather than the external. Willie’s and Braddock’s minds work overtime, and their invisible clash is more dramatic than the sporadic killings and the police pursuit. This lifts The Hit into a metaphysical realm where bullets have no reach.

Whereas Antonioni used landscapes to isolate his alienated characters, in The Hit Frears uses a few square feet to indicate the kind of estrangement that can exist within any family—one made up of, say, a sullen father, his complacent brother, his tigerish second wife, and a son who’s all id. Frears is a master at probing the fissures and gorges in real and unofficial families, as in My Beautiful Laundrette, The Grifters, Dangerous Liaisons, The Snapper, Liam, and The Queen. The Hit’s generational split actually facilitates a rapprochement near the end. Braddock panics when he sees Myron dozing on guard duty, but he finds Willie contemplating a waterfall. Willie stands with his back to Braddock, and the latter draws his gun, but is too awed to pull the trigger. The spectral image of Willie cast against the watery haze, his hair haloed by the sun, conjures the numinous cataracts in Wordsworth’s poetry, and evokes, too, John Everett Millais’ portrait of John Ruskin. It also suggests the Ascension of Jesus, but Willie’s look doesn’t forgive Braddock, it reminds him that death—the hit—is inescapable. That night, they talk familiarly in a wood, where Braddock questions Willie’s fearlessness. “We’re here,” Willie says, “then we’re not here. We’re somewhere else. Maybe. And it’s as natural as breathing. Why should we be scared?” He then quotes a John Donne poem that attempts to humble mortality. Earlier, Willie baffled Myron with another homily rationalizing death as innocuous. All this would seem like blatant sophistry, calculated to disarm his listeners, if it weren’t for Stamp’s brilliant, ambiguous performance. Willie’s last words and movements in the film are shocking in what they reveal about him. Even so, it’s not his sincerity we doubt, but his insincerity, because his prompting of compassion in Braddock leads to a kind of redemption for both.

Also includes  1988 interview with actor Terence Stamp from the television show Parkinson One-to-One and Original theatrical trailer