By Ryan Gilbey

Memo: The director Mike Hodges blames FilmFour and the British critics for the UK failure of his gambling movie, which became a hit in America. Nice theory, says Ryan Gilbey - but it's not the whole story

It's called synchronicity. This week, Charlie Parsons has been telling anyone with a microphone about how his show Survivor was spurned by homegrown television networks only to become the biggest thing in America since sliced Buffy. At the same time, another Brit is manfully resisting the urge to thumb his nose and cry "nur-nur-nur-nur-nur" at those countrymen who had doubted his vision.

Mike Hodges' film Croupier won't be seen by a fraction of the 6.6 million people who tuned into Survivor on Monday night, but the principle is the same. This playful thriller about a writer (Clive Owen) who draws on his job at a casino for material almost didn't see the light of day, or the dark of a cinema auditorium.

The story of what happened to Croupier looks at first sight like a straightforward case of goodies and baddies. FilmFour, the movie's biological parents, abandoned it. The company's head of film, David Aukin, had taken a dislike to the movie, claimed Hodges. Nasty David Aukin. Next, the BFI picked up the baton. Good old BFI. Croupier earned glowing reviews, but they may as well have been stamped in braille for all the good they did. "People were writing nice things about it, but there didn't seem to be the interest from the cinemas," a BFI spokesperson said shortly afterwards. "The BFI did their best," muses Hodges, "but they just don't have any money to distribute films properly."

So two years ago almost to the week, Croupier played for seven days at the National Film Theatre. If you missed it there, and if you had no regard for comfort or safety, you could have tracked it down to London's grungy movie graveyard, the ABC (now Odeon) Panton St, a venue that is not unlike a porno fleapit, only without the classy ambience and state-of-the-art facilities. Then it was dead and gone. Except that this corpse refused to stay buried.

The film took off in America thanks to more excitable reviews and that fabled entity, word of mouth. Suddenly it was on 150 screens and it's movie-of-the-year this and masterpiece that. Not bad for a little British picture that wasn't about ballet-dancing trade unionists. Now it's poised for a proper release in Britain, thanks to Aukin's successor Paul Webster. Hodges manages to be both cheery and sanguine about Croupier's resurrection, countering his hope that "they'll make some money out of it" with the reminder that he won't get to see any of it. Meanwhile, the film's admirers are lining up to wish it well. Including, bizarrely, David Aukin.

Aren't you in the wrong queue, sir? "Not at all," he says, "I just want people to go and enjoy the movie. God knows, it deserves an audience. Clive Owen's performance is remarkable, don't you think?"

Well, yes. But that isn't what the villain is supposed to say. I had Aukin pegged as the chump who turned his back on the Beatles, especially since he went on to become the "A" in HAL, Miramax's British arm which has now withered away (among HAL's projects was the Amy Jenkins-penned Elephant Juice, which stayed long on the shelf and mercifully briefly in our cinemas).

So you weren't the one who smothered Croupier at birth? "Absolutely not.

I'm not sure I was even at Channel 4 when it was distributed. I certainly didn't have anything to do with the distribution side." You didn't say, as has been claimed, that the only thing you liked about it was the credits? "Never. That's complete bullshit. Mike got very upset when the film was released because not many people went and it didn't have much of a run. It happens to a lot of movies. I don't want to spoil a good story but it's much easier to have a convenient figure to slag off, and that's what I've become."

Aukin's account isn't the only thing which departs from the fairy-tale.

Personally, I bristle a little at the new poster for Croupier, with its boast about being on more than 75 US critics' best-of-2000 lists, as though careless British writers had mistaken this diamond for plastic. While Hodges' observation that the critics "really know their stuff in the States whereas here they're a bit patchy" is a fair opinion. It is also true that every movie poster is cluttered with quotes from US reviewers dishing out five stars and the word "masterpiece" (although upon closer inspection these reviewers usually turn out to be hospital radio DJs from Bumfluff, TX).

Let's not pretend that America gravitates instinctively toward quality.

Remember, this is the country that proclaimed Benny Hill a god amongst men, but could never get a handle on T Rex.

I hope Croupier is widely seen this time around. To my eyes it looks different from when I saw it two years ago. It has acquired the sheen of well-earned smugness that can only come with success against the odds. It's the smell of approbation, and money and America and it brings something both disheartening and inevitable to the Croupier story. If it had been Elephant Juice in Croupier's shoes - or Purely Belter or Maybe Baby - we'd be getting them back too, and they would all still be abysmal pictures. And while it's understandable that Aukin wishes to set the record straight, it's rather a coincidence that he has chosen this moment, as American influence is revealed as pivotal in Croupier's continued success, to emphasise his connection with the film.

It's irrelevant whether the fate of Croupier was down to Aukin. Someone decided to dump the movie. Someone ticked the wrong box. One certainty here and in the US is that studios and distributors will invariably screw up the decent, idiosyncratic movies on their slate, either through accident or neglect.

A few years ago, I had praised highly a slightly offbeat picture - let's call it Film A - released by a major distributor, while being disdainful of Film B, its more populist release. Film A had done so-so business in the US before its British release, while Film B had been a phenomenon. "You gave Film B a bad review!" fumed the distributor's PR. "Yes, but I raved about Film A," I reminded her. "That doesn't matter," she said, "you still hated Film B."

Her point was clear. It's already written in the stars, or rather in the internal memos of every studio, which movies will sink and which will swim.

And if these stories do anything, it's reiterate the fact that film industry folk are often the last people that should be entrusted with something as fragile as a film. It's possible for a movie to stand or fall regardless of the advertising budget - the success of Croupier, or the relative failure of a supposed sure-thing like Almost Famous, proves that.

But then these are just the anomalies offered by the movie gods to give anyone who cares about such things just enough reason to carry on caring. 'Croupier' is released on 1 June

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'THE ONLY THING I LIKE ARE THE CREDITS'

Independent - Sunday, May 20, 2001

By Chris Darke

Memo The first distributor of `Croupier' wasn't impressed. Director Mike Hodges tells Chris Darke it's since earned $8m in the US and a UK re-release

Mike Hodges freely admits that his CV has "holes in it like a Swiss cheese". Two years ago, it looked like another hole would be added when his film Croupier came and went from our screens with barely a whimper. Then a strange thing happened.

After its distributor, FilmFour, had effectively buried it in the UK, Croupier was picked up in the US and went on to win breathless critical plaudits and strong audiences. "The word-of-mouth was terrific," Hodges tells me. "The critics were so universally behind it that it just started taking off commercially. It was guaranteed 17 screens for two weeks, and it built and built throughout the summer until it was on 150 screens - it took something in the region of $8m." Not bad for a small British film made for pounds 3m which tells the bleak story of a writer-turned-croupier.

Hodges, an affable, silver-bearded gent in his late sixties, shows no signs of slowing down or settling into his anecdotage. So, does he feel vindicated? "It's pretty wonderful," he chuckles. "It's one of those amazing stories that's never happened to me before, where you think a film has gone down the toilet and suddenly it gets stuck." He laughs out loud at his indelicately extended metaphor. "And then it comes back up again!" Hodges is now magnanimous about FilmFour's mishandling of his film. "It got lost in a management shuffle, and there was no-one there who was passionate about it" is his charitable take on the affair . David Aukin - who had originally commissioned Paul Mayersberg's script and bought Hodges onto the project - had infamously stated "the only thing I like about the film are the closing credits."

That Croupier doesn't go out of its way to be a likeable film is one of its strongest qualities. It's a hall-of-mirrors tale about Jack Manfred (Clive Owen), a would-be writer who takes a job as a croupier, constructs an alter-ego named Jake and starts to use the world of the casino as the material for a novel - writer creates character, character takes over writer, a strong, simple idea. Owen is particularly good at suggesting there's a lot going on beneath Jack's surface, his dark features busy with calculation. And Croupier has helped put Owen on the Hollywood map, with commentators being reminded of "the young Sean Connery". Hodges points out that it's not the first time he's used a writer as a character. His 1970 TV film Rumour was about a showbiz hack, and in Pulp (1972), the follow-up to Get Carter (1971), Michael Caine played a crime novelist out of his depth in the court of an ailing crime king (Mickey Rooney).

"I didn't believe in the writing side of it initially," Hodges says of Croupier. "Jack didn't have to be a good writer. In fact he probably isn't a good writer. But it gives him a kind of secretiveness." Croupier is good on the details of the gaming table and the pathology of the professional gambler. Jack, though, thinks he's above the job of croupier - he's the observer of the cold, fluid card-sharp skills that his disreputable dad has taught him. A voyeur, Jack is soon describing himself as being "hooked . . . on watching people lose". So when Jani de Villiers (Alex Kingston), a mysterious South African woman, proposes a money-making scam to him, Jack can only observe as Jake does her bidding and collaborates in a heist at the casino.

"It's not just about gambling," Hodges expands. "It's about our lives.

There's an enormous amount of gambling in all our lives now, especially for younger people. When I was your age, for example, and I was coming up, people had regular jobs, they had pensions. Their whole lives were taken care of. Now everyone's freelance. We're all on our own to a large degree, and it was this aspect that really fascinated me in Paul's script." Still, as a film-maker, surely you accept that risk and chance go with the territory? "Absolutely. And that's what makes you choose subjects which are risky. I've been freelance all my life so it's part of my existence - but I've been in situations where I've looked pretty doomed and my family's looked pretty doomed too, at least fiscally."

Nevertheless, Hodges is relishing both the irony of his film being salvaged by its American success and his career's current buoyancy. "I'd `retired' after Croupier," he tells me with rueful hilarity. "I thought, well, I don't need to make films anymore. I live in Dorset, grow vegetables and lead a very pleasant and simple life." The Arcadian retreat is on hold for the moment, as Hodges prepares to mount a self-penned play, Shooting Stars and Other Heavenly Pursuits, at the Old Red Lion Theatre in north London. Its subject is what Hodges describes as "the strange, surreal quality to film-making. It's `let's pretend', it's like being a child, really."

There's also a documentary for American television that he's just completed." It charts the progress of the serial killer in filmic form and in real life, because the two things are in a loop, they feed off each other," he explains. "That's to state the obvious. But the early films treated the character as a victim. Take M for example, Peter Lorre's character can't help himself. Then you move onto Psycho and Peeping Tom which manipulate the audience to the nth degree. It's called Murder by Numbers. Everything I seem to be doing at the moment is about numbers. . ." Then, with the stoicism of an old hand, Hodges adds: "So my number's come up. But it'll go down again at some point!"

'Croupier' (15) is out on 1 June