A Mike Hodges noir tends to be blacker and more cerebral than even the artsier end of the norm. Here he anatomizes the male ego in two respects: a man’s compulsion to make one’s mark and his sexual identity.
The former is expressed in hero Will's meditation that frames the narrative: “Most thoughts are memories. And memories deceive. The walk. The way he smoked a cigarette. Laughed. The dead are dead. He's gone. What's left to ever say he was here at all? Not much.”
Clearly Will is a man of will. Fed up with his criminal life he suffers a breakdown, then disappears into the forest for a basic, solitary existence. Three years later his social life is reawakened when he finds a gang-beaten man in the forest. He takes him to the victim’s address then returns to his monkish isolation. His brother Davey’s surprising suicide returns him to his abandoned world. For Davey’s apparently wasted life compounds Will’s grief at having wasted his own.
Davey was a handsome, likeable, happy-go-lucky chap who dabbled in drug sales. Being “webbed up with all the beautiful people” brought him easy success. His wastefulness we read from the party scene where he locks himself in a bedroom with a rich beautiful girl — only to sell her drugs. He’s too manly to indulge himself. Even money he dismisses as “a cunt’s drug” — but he keeps a healthy stash. Will has no doubt about his brother’s heterosexual bent.
But Davey’s confidence, self-respect and will are destroyed when he’s raped by Boad, a crime boss who covers his wealth by his front as a luxury car dealer. The macho Boad has a beautiful wife and estate and a macho swagger.
In explaining the rape to Will, Boad reveals a shivered masculinity. He describes following Davey through his nocturnal adventures. Boad’s language is so full of disgust that he seems to be casting a moral righteousness upon his attack on the boy. But Boad is rather expressing his lustful attraction to him. His suppressed homosexuality compels him to destroy the spur and victim of his love. At the same time, Davey may have felt his own sexual identity undercut by his violation.
When Will banished himself to the wilds he turned away from his devoted lover, Helen. He tries to recover that relationship when he asks her to pack her back and run off with them. After despatching Boad Will speeds to get her. As his car rounds the bend in the last shot we know what’s awaiting him. Helen is a gunpoint captive of an imported gunself Boad had hired to kill Will.
In this tangle as in the web of masculine sexuality there is no escape. Just the deceptive and fugitive memories.
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