Starring Clive Owen as a casino worker tempted by a heist, Mike Hodges’ Croupier was one of defining British crime films of the 1990s. A quarter of a century on, we went looking for the locations.
You have to make a choice in life: Be a gambler or a croupier. So believes Jack Manfred, the hero of Croupier, whose casino job places him halfway between the bosses and the bettors, so he can keep an eye on both. He is a cold, controlled man, at pains to tell us, I do not gamble. True enough, he does not gamble at casino games of chance, but in his personal life he places appalling bets, and by the end of the film is involved with three women and a scheme to defraud the casino.
Manfred (Clive Owen) wants to be a writer and narrates his own story in the third person as if he s writing it. With his slicked-back black hair, symmetrical good looks and cold detachment, he s a reminder of Alain Delon s professional killer in Le Samourai a man who wants to stay aloof and calculate the odds, but finds himself up to his neck in trouble, anyway. There s the hint that this is a pattern, and that at one time he did gamble, obsessively.