Legend (dir. Brian Helgeland, 2015) — Review

Read the Legend screenplay PDF here — for private, personal and educational use only.

“The world is quite like London,” muses the omnipotent, dead, and deeply sad narrator of Legend. “It's not good. It's not bad. It just is. There's no morality or dishonor. Just your own lonely code.”

Like any good story — gangster yarn, hero epic, and everything in between — Legend boils down to a female-led tragedy, with lashings of richly choreographed fight scenes, smashed glass, snorted powders, and the like. Yet even with Tom Hardy in the dual Parent Trap-esque star vehicle of benighted twins — this time battling it out for control of ‘60s gangland, rather than an American summer camp — the song remains the same. Legend, a thoughtful biopic of the Kray twins, benefits from both its notional protagonists being firmly in the grave. Thus, its third wheel (narrator Frances Shea, the real-life sister of Reggie Kray’s driver) can come to the fore, bringing the whole sordid narrative to the standing of a Greek tragedy, untarnished by its uncomfortable proximity to real life.

Set in London’s East End of the 1960s, Legend follows the rightly infamous Kray twins — Ronnie and Reggie, both played here by insouciant beefcake Tom Hardy — as they unite their muscle to take over a chunk of London’s criminal underworld. So far, so standard. Yet the real hero of the story is neither of the virtuosic Kray/Hardies, but Reggie’s real life spouse Frances (Emily Browning). People may scoff at the outdated sexism of the postwar ganglands, but the ease with which Browning transfers her wide-eyed, vulnerable Bambi gaze from her breakout in Sucker Punch (2012) to period drama suggests that many of the same forces are still at play. Mercifully, this time we get a gangster epic from a Valley of the Dolls perspective — a peek behind the masses of immaculate cat-eye liner and bouffant hairpieces that framed the ‘Greatest Ever Decade’.

“London in the 1960s”, begins the voiceover. “Everyone had a story about the Krays”.

Legend does an excellent job of making its setting into a character. From its opening shot of the Bow Bells to the bright lights of Piccadilly, the nightmarish utopia of a big city on the making looms large. This landscape — a counterpart to the timeless ‘dreaming spires’ of the Oxbridge elite forged at the same time, with opposing interests — must be understood for any of the characters cast upon it to make sense. This, suggests the film, is a world of boundless ambition: “bloodthirsty, illogical, but funny as well”. And those who share its traits are best placed to navigate it.

Enter the Kray twins: here, Tom Hardy; in real life, a pair of identical twins in command of a gang, the Firm, which ran East London from the late 1950s to 1967. After absconding from military service, the two bought a swanky Knightsbridge club as part of a protection racket, securing their ascendency in the Swinging Sixties. “They were the best years of our lives,” recalled Ronnie. “The Beatles and the Rolling Stones were rulers of pop music, Carnaby Street ruled the fashion world… and me and my brother ruled London. We were fucking untouchable.” Ronnie, who was gay but just as violent as his older brother, embarked on a series of high-profile liaisons with the political establishment, which went relatively unchecked until the late 1960s. As far as the ‘legend’ is concerned, the narrative stops not long after this, with the brothers’ arrest in 1968.

As far the brothers’ takeover of London clubland is concerned, they are as ‘untouchable’ as Reggie claims. Yet, just as with other internecine conflicts of the period — the Troubles in Northern Ireland, so recently immortalised by Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast — the real victims appear not at the fore of the action with their guns and natty suits, but in the domestic arena. Frances, heartbreakingly portrayed by Emily Browning, suffers the fate of many women before and after her — tasked with cleaning up after chest-puffing boyfriends and brothers.