In the early 1950s, when Howard Marks was a child growing up in working-class south Wales, Tom Lehrer wrote an ironic pastiche of the sentimental song "The Old Lamplighter" serenading another local hero: "Every evening you will find him/ Around our neighbourhood/ He's the old dope peddler/ Doing well by doing good." Little could the 10-year-old Marks have guessed that one day he would be similarly, though less ironically, celebrated in a movie about his career as the world's most famous drug trafficker.
Presented as a lecture given to an enthusiastic young audience from the stage of the august little Bristol Old Vic theatre, the long-haired, 60-year-old Marks tells his story: how he wins a scholarship to Oxford in the mid-1960s, develops a taste there for grass, moves out of teaching into importing marijuana on what eventually becomes an industrial scale and ends up, in 1988, with a 25-year sentence in the States.
Along his adventurous, highly lucrative and extremely dangerous way, he experiences "asexual orgasms" while transporting dope through customs and becomes involved with the IRA, MI6, dubious Middle Eastern businessmen and the mafia. After seven years in a US federal penitentiary, he emerges wholly unrepentant to write Mr Nice, a comic bestseller that brings together a self-justifying Apologia Pro Vita Sua with Waugh's Decline and Fall.
The film is a lighthearted, amoral comedy thriller, its opening monochrome turning to colour when Howard smokes his first spliff as an undergraduate. The writer-director Bernard Rose takes a highly indulgent view of its hero, seeing him as a modernday Robin Hood running rings around the absurd sheriffs who pursue him as he provides a public service. This is very much Marks's self-image. Others might regard him as a conscienceless, borderline psychopath, and the riveting central performance by Rhys Ifans, who plays Marks as a charming, raffish boyo from the Welsh valleys, doesn't wholly preclude such an interpretation.
