‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ So says reporter Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young) in 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and it’s advice that American writer-director Brian Helgeland (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of LA Confidential) has applied to his biopic of gangster twins Ronnie and Reggie Kray, who ran roughshod over London’s East End during the 50s and 60s.
With stage-to-screen adaptations, much of the immediacy and vitality of the original production can so be easily lost in translation. Not so with London Road, which makes its way to the big screen via critically acclaimed runs at London’s Cottsloe and Olivier theatres and loses absolutely none of its impact in the process.
“There can be no murder in paradise.” That is the intriguing backbone of both novelist Tom Rob Smith’s 2008 best-seller and this rip-roaring adaptation, which casts the multi-faceted Tom Hardy in the role of a battle-hardy member of the military police in Stalin-era Soviet Union.
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