Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock Imagery

Pinkie's death scene

When Pinkie is discovered with Rose by Dallow, Ida, and the policeman, he struggles to find a way to fight them without the gun that Rose has just thrown away. He alights upon a final option -- the bottle of vitriol he carries with him -- and, in a sequence portrayed through a cinematic kind of disjointed montage, in which the linkage between cause and effect is rarely clear, Pinkie tries to throw the vitriol but then reels back when the policeman's baton shatters it on him.

Pinkie and Rose's sex scene

We do not actually see any of the bodily movements between Pinkie and Rose as they have sex. Instead, Greene describes the scene through Pinkie's abstract considerations of sin and damnation, the scraps of words exchanged between the two lovers, and the insistent bell-ringing downstairs.

Mr. Prewitt drunk

Pinkie watches in a kind of fascinated horror as Mr. Prewitt, a man who usually seems very knowledgeable and in control of himself, dissolves into a revolting and self-pitying character while drunk on a Sunday. Because of indigestion and a stomach ulcer, Mr. Prewitt's gesticulations are especially exaggerated and grotesque.

Pinkie pinching Rose

Although Pinkie is often described in the abstract terms of his mental tribulations over the fear of damnation, when he is with Rose the description instead zooms into the very concrete and particular action of his pinching parts of her, such as her wrist. This serves as an embodiment in an action of Pinkie's acidic and hurtful personality and the way that Rose's passive and masochistic personality receives it.