Dead Man's Cards

For anyone who has been refused entry to, or forcibly ejected from, their evening venue of choice by a club bouncer, Dead Man's Cards offers an entertaining glimpse at the view from the other side of the threshold. Set around the mean streets of Liverpool, though largely interior, James Marquand's gritty debut feature inhabits a familiar underworld milieu but aspires to the mythology of the Western, picturing the tough guy doorman as Wild West lawman, a mediator of criminal and public spheres, and the one firm hand against a seething nocturnal life.

Retired heavyweight boxer Tom (James McMartin) takes a job on the door at a tawdry nightclub run by Billy the Cowboy (a delightful performance by the late Tom Bell), an ageing teddy boy with an immaculately greased quiff, combed eyebrows and a fixation on Wild Bill Hickok. Tom is taken under the wing of Paul (Paul Barber), a stocky, reptile-skinned security man who teaches him the finer points of 'meeting and greeting', including where to take troublemakers for rough treatment away from the gaze of security cameras. A former soldier who refuses to join forces with coke dealing gangland boss Chongi (Russell Mark), Paul is a man of scruples and dedication, but his taut, pulsating cranium warns of fierce volatility and a temper he is powerless to contain.

Next to this commanding presence, McMartin's Tom risks looking barred from his own party. Abandoned by his frustrated wife after being diagnosed as impotent, and saddled with a could have-been-a-contender failed-champion backstory, Tom is a hapless hired hand whose brutish effectiveness is repeatedly undermined by his lack of guile. Whether being fed pills and dreams of riches by Chongi's men or being doped with Viagra and involuntarily fellated by the club's amorous barmaid, Tom is too often the ursine bumbler to provide a dynamic centre to the narrative. His rocky marriage is sketchily drawn and provides little ballast, petering out in a couple of superficial shouting scenes.

But Dead Man's Cards biggest strength is its vibrantly scuzzy backdrop, which centres on Billy's club and the penumbral alley where intoxicated hordes queue for admission. Up to its rafters in grubby glamour, Billy's draws crowds whose behaviour is dictated by the skills of the club's various DJs, and Tom soon learns what kind of disorder and drug use to expect on any given night. Through it all strides the anachronistic proprietor, filtering out the repetitive beats with a private stream of country music on his headphones.

Billy imagines the club as a Western-style saloon, and it begins to assume that mythic character when Chongi zeroes in on the establishment to get at Paul: a Rio Bravo situation percolates. But while John Wayne enjoyed the benefit of a motley posse to help protect the jailhouse in Howard Hawks' Western, the tension in Dead Man's Cards is dissipated because Paul seems more than capable of keeping Chongi at bay single-handed. For all their big business bluster, Chongi and his men lack genuine menace; when a psyched up Paul asks Tom rhetorically 'do I look worried?', the viewer doesn't doubt that he isn't.

Every Rio Bravo needs its Walter Brennan and Marquand's film has two, with a local vagrant named Irish (Andrew Schofield) rivalling Billy in the doddery old-timer stakes. Dead Man's Cards bares an unexpectedly soft centre when Tom finds a task for Irish, interrupting his addled reveries to ask him to deliver a provocative parcel to Chongi. Irish is first encountered in a semi-fantasy sequence, fending off casual assailants with a length of metal piping magically transformed into a peashooter. Similarly, a fleeting, quasi-celestial vision, as a groggy Tom watches three girls sashaying down the street in hen-night angel wings, gestures at divinity. Though the redemption that seems promised for Tom fails to materialise, such moments reveal a film with half an eye on the stars, for all its wallowing in the gutter.

This review features in the January 2007 issue of Sight & Sound.