“The Russians made films of martyrdom; the Americans made advertisements; the British did what they always do in cinema: nothing.” Jean-Luc Godard
“British cinema is a contradiction in terms.” François Truffaut
Crime films dream the collective nightmare of a nation. When Britain turned its hand to noir, even the licence of fiction couldn’t sustain a belief in organised crime in this sceptred isle. Needing another ready enemy, British cinema turned inwards. The spiv, really no more than a neighbourhood lag peddling nylons and other scant niceties your ration book wouldn’t stretch to, was enough of a spectre for the conservative post-war period, providing antagonist for a whole cycle of films.
During the Second World War, British cinema could acknowledge wartime difficulties – struggle, pain, even the reality of death – but ultimately showed reconciliation with duty and faith to the cause. From 1955 onwards, British cinema – rudderless, underfunded and increasingly threatened by television – retreated into wartime nostalgia, with few films willing to expand their view of the realities of war. It’s startling to compare films made in ‘defeated nations’ like Japan during this period such as Kon Ichikawa’s astonishingly bleak Fires on the Plain and his pacifist parable The Burmese Harp, both of which look inward at Japanese atrocity. If we want to understand older Briton’s unjustified pride in Britain’s wartime record, we can look to the likes of The Dam Busters (1955) and Sink the Bismarck! (1960) for mixing a powerful concoction of undiluted adventure and heroism that centred British victory, and put aside the values fought for or the allies it relied on. (A parallel propaganda was ongoing for the Empire in films like Simba (1955) and Where No Vultures Fly (1951).)
However, between these two waves of reassuring morality and revisionist triumphalism there was a brief eddy of British cinema that presented the wounded resentment and ethical muddle of post-war life to the public. As both a reflection of the bitterness of the post-war settlement and an attempt to win an arms race with the pessimism and brutality of American film noir, films like No Orchids for Miss Blandish, Brighton Rock, The Long Memory, Obsession struck an unpleasant chord. The broad spine of British cinema history swings from Ealing hijinks to Angry Young Men, but these films make an attempt to bring together the unmixable elements of the acting style and filmmaking craft of the former with the mentality of the latter.
One of the best, strangest films from this period is Alberto Cavalcanti’s They Made Me a Fugitive (buy the beautiful Indicator Blu-Ray here). The censors and critics drew fairly strong issue with They Made Me a Fugitive, which, even allowing for the decades’ slackening of the reins of censorship, is hard to understand. The Monthly Film Bulletin scorched the film for its ‘sordid sensationalism’; more revealingly still, reliably querulous Observer reviewer CA Lejeune framed the film’s issue thus: ‘They Made Me a Fugitive has worried me a lot. Up to a point it is an extremely clever film: that is what worries me.’ Falling foul less from specific moments (though apparently a scene involving a milk bottle was deemed dangerously imitable by the youth) than from ‘I know it when I see it’ queasiness of tone, They Made Me a Fugitive uses the criminal underworld to diagnose a much broader malaise in British life.
Superficially, They Made Me a Fugitive is a Hitchcockian thriller, revisiting one of his central themes of ‘the wrong man’ who is brought into a web beyond their knowing. Yet the world it presents is what darkens the pattern. In North by Northwest, Roger Thornhill is brought into a conspiracy due to mistaken identity; an accidental flick of God’s remote and he’s in another channel of existence, one he otherwise would be able to avoid. In ...Fugitive, a picture emerges of a fallen world where all life is perilously close to sadistic chaos.
Clem (Trevor Howard) is a person and a problem: an ex-RAF man dulling the pain of his service and his prospects with alcohol. In the world that ...Fugitive presents, it takes only the lightest of ill breezes to draw him to the demimonde. Commissioned by gang leader Narcissus (his nickname ‘Narcy’ a close homophone for ‘Nazi’ in case there was doubt about the kind of villainous transference at play) he avers when asked to get involved in the ‘sherbet’ business. But he’s already taken a step too far, and Narcy takes the opportunity to frame Clem for the murder of a policeman.
Pressed into fifteen years of hard labour, Clem escapes, hell bent on returning to London and forcing his gang members to attest to his innocence. It’s on this tour that the blackness of British life at the time is revealed. There’s a smart reversal in the criminal having more to fear from ‘innocent’ society, and what Clem finds on the road is deeply unsettling. As soon as he begins his flight, a farmer is ready without hesitation to empty buckshot into his back. His next stop brings him to a housewife who is keen to aid him, but – speaking with uncanny glassiness – her help is conditional on Clem helping her murder her alcoholic husband. Both of these encounters hint at a world where the usual civilities have melted away, where the war had made clear the atavism lurking beneath the veneer. One senses critics and censors were really rejecting this notion of the body of Britain not renewed by victory but irremediably corrupted.
Arousing what is beneath the surface was a consistent strategy across Cavalcanti’s filmmaking. Although it was relatively recessed in his later studio work, he is known for having directed Rien Que Les Heures (1926), a ‘city symphony’ that was a surrealist landmark and heavy inspiration for Man with a Movie Camera. Cavalcanti brought this formally experimental mode to his work with the GPO Film Unit, proving a mentor to many in the department, especially Len Lye. His work has in common with surrealist style the exposure of the psychological mask that covers bourgeois life, whether that’s the ‘keeping up with the Joneses via Buñuel’ of his short Pett and Pott or his war effort Went the Day Well? (1942). A story of invasion on the home front, it rides a deep uncanniness, with villagers innocently gunned down by machine guns and forced to take up arms. Cavalcanti described (with some relish) the opportunities the subject matter offered him: ‘You have this apparently idyllic village but as soon as war comes the villagers become absolute monsters.’ They Made Me a Fugitive shares this quality, with even the positive characters proving at best reluctant heroes. There are plenty of nods to visual surrealism (a pool table dissolves into a moor, a villain’s face is warped into a grotesque in a mirror, the brilliant final fatal fight over three gigantic ‘RIP’ letters), but there is also surrealism of tone, with coffins filled with Scotch and a woman in her dotage making unnerving reference to her boyfriend.
Cavalcanti also seems to have specialised in bringing out something deeper and more unsettling in his actors. In his sequence from Ealing’s superb horror anthology Dead of Night, Michael Redgrave plays a ventriloquist in a battle of wills with his dummy. Besides the heavy Freudianism of the plot (that eventually sees Redgrave symbolically castrate himself by murdering the dummy), Redgrave’s style of performance seems to exist on another plane. There is something already unsettling about watching the cut glass, jovial stage-like acting restraint brush up against the film’s sinister tales (a metaphorical severed head under a tea cosy). British cinema had been on a horror hiatus during the war. Yet stranger still is the juxtaposition with Redgrave’s genuinely haunted, broken performance, a pushing towards something unholy, a puncturing of the polite parlour game.
In …Fugitive Trevor Howard doubles down on the conflicted gentleman he brought to Brief Encounter. Howard, whose star rose as the war ended, could have ended up vying with John Mills for roles that put common decency first, ready to ‘play up and play the game’ for the Empire. Yet Howard found success in Graham Greene adaptations (whose downbeat take on masculinity and the folly of heroism perfectly suited the post-war mood) and other similarly off-kilter tales of moral murk. Howard refuses to put his wartime trauma back into a drawer. Initially Narcy pitches his predicament as needing a life of crime to make up for the deficit of excitement in peacetime. Yet Howard’s performance gives a full window on the scraps of detail the script offers about his wartime experience as a POW in Germany for two years. ‘Madam the only reason I’m a fat-headed fool and not a damned hero is because I went on doing what the country put me in a uniform to do, after they’d taken it back,’ he complains to the would-be black widow housewife. They Made Me a Fugitive shows a world where the genie is out of the bottle and unsettles by refusing to reassure (including its glum ending) that it can be put back.
Recommendations
Trevor Howard plays alongside Sean Connery in The Offence. One of the neglected films in Sidney Lumet’s filmography, it’s a similarly bitter tale of attempting to do the right thing in fallen circumstances, but with the licence of the ‘70s. There’s a very good Blu-Ray (+DVD) from Eureka.
A late tribute to Lynn Shelton who recently died far too young. If you’ve never seen her Humpday, it’s one of the best films about modern masculinity and I also heartily recommend the comforting Your Sister’s Sister, a sweet, well-measured film with a trio of winning performances.
In a similar mode, if you are looking for some absorbing, emotionally gentle viewing at the moment, may I recommend Easy on Netflix. An excellent receptacle for the easy-going, naturalistic lope of mumblecore godfather Joe Swanberg, it’s an eminently poppable anthology show about relationships. As the series expands, we return to certain characters. By the time we get to Season 3, Episode 5 (‘Swipe Left’), a couple we have seen explore non-monagamy have a discussion that at first seems like a short capper to the episode that expands out to a painful, honest, beautiful state of the union discussion between two people unsure how much further love can take them.