It\u2019s those piercing blue eyes and the implacable interiority. Pasolini\u2019s Teorema<\/em> needed a guy who could believably saunter in and seduce every member of a bourgeois family so hard they become either catatonic or Communists. (You can\u2019t imagine the movie with anybody else.) He was an immortal Billy Budd<\/em>, as if the actor fell to earth just to play Melville\u2019s doomed seraphic seaman. In 1999, Steven Soderbergh built a shrine to Stamp with the prismatic crime movie classic The Limey<\/em>, in which his aging, impossibly elegant Cockney hoodlum cut a swath through a rotting Los Angeles. Fifteen years before, the actor\u2019s ethereal presence had anchored an even moodier gangster movie, Stephen Frears\u2019 The Hit<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Inspired by the true-life tale of an armed robber who ratted out 32 associates in exchange for immunity, The Hit<\/em> stars Stamp as Willie Parker, an impish, surprisingly literate scoundrel laying low in the deserts of Spain ten years after sending all his old accomplices to the clink. But the past catches up with Parker, as he always assumed it someday would. He\u2019s nabbed by a brusque Irishman named Braddock (John Hurt, behind a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers) and his numbskull prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Myron (Tim Roth) who has the bleached hair and attire of a soccer hooligan. The two are tasked with dragging Parker to Paris, where he can face the wrath of his old boss, Corrigan (played silently in flashbacks by British folkie Lennie Peters.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Braddock is lean, mean and barely speaks \u2013 an anomaly for Hurt, an actor who usually plays verbose eccentrics. He smokes more than he talks, but it\u2019s admittedly tough to get a word in edgewise around Myron, a rookie and a flake played with typical gusto by Roth, making his big-screen debut after some hugely influential television work. The role was originally to be played by Joe Strummer, but his band wasn\u2019t keen on him taking so much time away from the day job, so The Clash frontman told Frears \u201cto get that skinhead instead,\u201d referring to Roth\u2019s role in Alan Clarke\u2019s Made in Britain<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What rattles them is how chill Parker is about the whole deal. He never puts up a fight or tries to flee, at times even assisting his increasingly bumbling captors. It\u2019s an expert use of Stamp\u2019s stillness and screen presence. The more serene he is, the more it throws badass Braddock off his game. The elder assassin starts making stupid mistakes, screw-ups that leave them saddled with a young female hostage (Laura del Sol) on whom he can\u2019t quite seem to pull the trigger. Few actors fall apart as elegantly as Hurt. He seems to be crumbling behind those sunglasses. Parker\u2019s gotten inside his head, planting sly insinuations and pointed asides. Here\u2019s where Stamp\u2019s playfulness as an actor comes in especially handy \u2014 he\u2019s able to make being beatific into a way of fucking with you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Peter Prince\u2019s screenplay would seem to owe a debt \u2013 at least conceptually \u2013 to Ernest Hemingway\u2019s short story The Killers<\/em>, in which a professional hitman is confounded by his prey\u2019s readiness to die. The story was previously adapted into two terrific B-movies, first in 1946 by director Robert Siodmak in the screen debut of a hunky young actor named Burt Lancaster. Then Don Siegel\u2019s 1964 take on the tale featured Ronald Reagan\u2019s first and only villain role, at least as an actor. (There\u2019s an incredibly cathartic, oft-rewatched scene in which John Cassavetes socks the Gipper in the jaw.) But Frears has always angrily harumphed off suggestions that his film has anything to do with the Hemingway story. The man harrumphs<\/a> like few others, but I\u2019m still not buying it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Hit<\/em> perplexed audiences on its initial release, promising a down-and-dirty crime picture and delivering existential malaise instead. In 1984, the movie was at least ten years ahead of or behind its time, a mood piece more suited to \u201870s New Hollywood revisionism or the \u201890s indie revolution. The Spanish deserts leave these inner city gangsters lost in the cinematic language of a Western. Everyone looks out of place save for Stamp, perhaps too symbolically dressed head-to-toe in white, while seeming to levitate above the proceedings. At one point, he even reads aloud John Donne\u2019s \u201cDeath, Be Not Proud (Holy Sonnet 10)\u201d but the words are wasted on his abductors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They understand eventually, when it catches up with them. After all, death catches up with everyone. Even Terence Stamp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “The Hit” is streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a>, Amazon Prime<\/a>, Tubi<\/a>, and Plex<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/hit2-1024x555.jpg\")
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