And the bar scene is a pastiche of "Casablanca" and similar second-world-war resistance films, evoking the symbiosis between organised crime milieus and urban underground political movements.
In crime stories, the church milieu tends to be used either as a "cosy" setting or as a dramatic backdrop for a pederast priest, but The Resurrection of the Body is thoughtful, perceptive and subtle, which makes it far more creepy and disturbing than its counterparts.
After 2001, according to a study entitled "Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Hate Crime," the "violent extremist nationalist milieu" — encompassing such groups as the B.N.P. and, lately, the E.D.L. — began to shift the focus of its opprobrium from race to religion.
The second movie, "Red Riding: 1980," glossed up with 35-millimeter film and directed by James Marsh with an elegant, self-conscious visual style at odds with the grunge milieu and desperate crimes — dead bodies are as attractively framed as some clouds reflected in a window — pivots on Peter Hunter (a solid Paddy Considine).
The movie, Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times, is "glossed up with 35-millimeter film" and directed "with an elegant, self-conscious visual style at odds with the grunge milieu and desperate crimes -- dead bodies are as attractively framed as some clouds reflected in a window".
Needless to say, the professional details in the West series are meticulously accurate, as are her descriptions of the social milieu in which the crimes take place.
Another feature is their focus on the lower-class milieu as the source of crime.
A recent rare successful Hollywood movie set in a lower-class milieu was "The Town," a crime thriller directed by and starring Ben Affleck.
Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us and John Sayles's Matewan are much better and more authoritative in their treatment of crime and social conflict in this particular milieu in the 1920s and 30s.
In this milieu, politicians increasingly learned that crime could pay -- for them.
