‘A Thousand Blows’ review: Steven Knight’s boxing drama is anything but subtle
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Fictionally speaking, of all criminal pursuits, thievery is the most romantic because it requires a significant degree of cleverness, of subtlety and skill and, by practical necessity, isn’t violent. Thieves do their work without being noticed. It’s not just a case of “nobody gets hurt”; nobody has to be told that nobody gets hurt because the job is long finished before the theft even registers. Aladdin, Arsène Lupin, A.J. Raffles, Cary Grant in “To Catch a Thief,” David Niven in “The Pink Panther.” Catwoman. Generally speaking, it’s a good look.
Boxing, whose appeal will forever remain, not mysterious, but foreign to some of us, has also been a favorite subject for storytelling, especially in the movies, going back to numerous Depression-era fight films and forward to “Raging Bull” and last year’s “La Máquina,” and on and on — often tales of personal advancement from poor beginnings, with criminal elements of a less savory sort frequently complicating matters.
In “A Thousand Blows,” premiering Friday on Hulu, “Peaky Blinders” creator Steven Knight has taken these two elements and mashed them together like a breath mint and a candy mint. A semihistorical melodrama of Victorian East London, with some characters drawn (and redrawn) from life, it’s set on the one hand around bare-knuckle backroom boxing and on the interlaced other among the historical Forty Elephants, “the biggest, fastest, most independent gang of female thieves in the whole of London,” according to its “queen,” Mary Carr (Erin Doherty, “The Crown”). It’s half “Rocky,” half “Ocean’s 11,” to overstate the case, with a sort of love triangle laid on top.
Straw hats on their heads, Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby, “Small Axe”) and his friend Alec Munroe (Francis Lovehall) have come to London from Jamaica, where Hezekiah believes he has a job as a lion tamer at the Zoological Gardens. (He will discover something quite different.) Fresh off the boat — literally, it’s there in the background — and in search of cheap lodgings, they head east per a friendly policeman’s direction, to where “the sun don’t shine and the birds don’t sing” and the major players in our story reside within blocks of one another.
One pole of the action is the Green Dolphin Hotel, where Hezekiah and Alec finally find a place to land, and where Hezekiah’s ability to speak Chinese, a legacy from a Chinese grandmother, endears him to the proprietor, Mr. Lao (Jason Tobin, quiet and wonderful); some Elephants are around as well. The other pole is the Blue Coat Boy tavern — also frequented by the Elephants — owned by Sugar Goodson (Stephen Graham, “Boardwalk Empire” and a million other things), a temperamental bruiser who dominates the local fight scene to the point that it’s just a matter of other fighters queuing up to be knocked out by him, and his younger, smarter brother, Treacle (James Nelson-Joyce).
The fights, which take place in the back of the bar, and are packed and seemingly illegal, are where our three principals first convene. (Big, affable bartender William “Punch” Lewis, played by Daniel Mays, is also the ring announcer.) Hezekiah, hoping to earn money as his and Alec’s runs out, signs up to take on Sugar — and would have beaten him too, if he hadn’t been tripped from outside the ring. That Sugar knows this, makes him determined to beat Hezekiah “fair and square.” And that he senses Mary’s interest in him, makes that determination more fierce. He will beat him, he tells Hezekiah, and “I will not stop until you’re dead.”
“Why would you want me dead?”
“It’s like looking in a mirror; there can’t be two of us.”
Where Sugar is content just to rule his corner of East London — well, he’s probably never actually content — Alec, who acts as Hezekiah’s trainer, sees big things for his friend and himself. And Mary, for her part, is too ambitious to settle for mere pickpocketing and shoplifting and the occasional smash-and-grab; she’s got a big, classic, complicated heist percolating in her head that will involve more than just the Elephants.
As regards Mary, in film terms, Hezekiah has the clear advantage as a potential suitor; he’s fantastically good-looking, a head higher than Sugar, wears a suit like the next 19th century James Bond, is well spoken and has a natural ability not only to mix among toffs and swells but to stand up to their patronizing and racist remarks. (He’s bold. Maybe too bold?) Graham is stuck in brute mode for the earlier episodes — a brief glimpse of him drawing a fight poster is a relief — but the writers eventually let him breathe a little, and the actor does some delicate work. He’s like the monster in a monster movie, unable to tame the beast inside, looking longingly at a normal, happy human life. “You’re sad,” says his 6-year-old niece, hitting a nail on the head.
A raft of superb performances aside, “A Thousand Blows” is not particularly subtle, nor does that even seem the idea. Its worthwhile sociopolitical points and allegiances — it stands with women, immigrants and the poor, for natural dignity against mere manners — are writ large; its emotional entanglements are operatic, its heist narrative the stuff of pulp fiction, the boxing story the stuff of beat-them-to-a-pulp fiction. It’s loud and intentionally clamorous. (One could argue that this place and time was in fact loud and clamorous, but one could also say that they didn’t have TVs then.) It can be obvious at times, but it knows its business and drives on, all the way to next season’s coming attractions.
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