Je suis un fugitif

I borrowed the Kino Video release of this from my public library today. I'd never heard of it before and, having just watched it, I can say I'm really amazed this is not a famous movie in the United States. I'm not sure if it's very well-known in England or not. Like another landmark British movie, BLOW-UP, THEY MADE ME A FUGITIVE is directed by a foreigner. There is more attention to sound and camera-work than I've noticed in most British movies from the end of the war until about 1956 or so. Warner Brothers gets a huge credit at the start, and I'm wondering if that studio merely distributed it in the United States or if British audiences also saw "Warner Brothers" in huge letters on the screen. It has a lot in common with the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall movies of the forties, and the screenwriter, Noel Langley, had worked in Hollywood on several movies, notably THE WIZARD OF OZ. So, it's British, but it has American and continental style. I mention Bogart. I should also mention Richard Widmark. Clem and Narcy easily could have been played by those two actors with no change in approach. There's a rooftop scene later echoed in TO CATCH A THIEF and the words "It's Later Than You Think" keep appearing, and I've seen at least two later movies which make use of that. It's scarier than the American gangster movies of the late forties.

Also, the title begs comparison to the 1939 Warner Brothers picture THEY MADE ME A CRIMINAL and an early-thirties one called I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG. A typical American gangster movie from the thirties had a World War One vet who sells bootleg liquor during the Great Depression and THEY MADE ME A FUGITIVE makes the protagonist a World War Two vet dealing in rationed items such as cigarettes and liquor. There seems to have been a conscious effort, in the making of this movie, to capture the audience American gangster movies had had in Britain. Perhaps there was an effort to get an American audience, too. See it for good acting, wonderful production and, most importantly, unexpected realism. If it's clichéd, it's put together so well as to seem fresh almost sixty years after it was made. And seeing Peter Bull cheered me up.

A British noir as good as the definitive ones being turned out in the States by such consensus masters as Mann, Dassin, and Lewis, to name three. And what about that great ending that still leaves me flabbergasted. Three cheers for a British cinema that apparently was able to operate without the albatross of a Production Code and still not wreck the nation's moral fiber. Needless to say, those final few minutes would never have been allowed Stateside where the scales of justice always triumphed, no matter how the world really works.

Then too, consider the household Howard stumbles into by accident, where the zoned out housewife is only too eager to perforate her boozy hubby. One look at that demented visage and she's a lot scarier than any of the professionals. No wonder Howard flees back to the safety of London's underworld. This may also be the cheapest electricity bill on record since the brightest sound-stage bulb checks in at about 60 watts—they don't call it "noir" for nothing. And keep an ear cocked for some of the snappiest dialogue this side of Dashiel Hammett, especially from that old crone Aggie, who, I shudder to think, might actually be somebody's grandmother.

Not that everything is roses. Some of the set-ups operate only at a stretch. For example, Howard's aim with a milk bottle should have him pitching for the Yankees. And he does it with such casual flair, you'd never guess his life is on the line. Nonetheless, the movie's a real sleeper and should have been exported to our shores a lot sooner. I expect, that daring finale would have inspired our own filmmakers to greater sneaky lengths in subverting the dead hand of Hollywood censorship.

Alberto Cavalcanti's THEY MADE ME A FUGITIVE is, to my tastes, the great British Gangster movie and a contender for great Film-Noir as well. At the time of release it was probably overshadowed by BRIGHTON ROCK and THE THIRD MAN, both similar in look and attitude, but what sets FUGITIVE apart is its uncompromisingly bleak realism and pessimistic amorality.

Trevor Howard plays the part of a former R.A.F. pilot who is struggling to survive in the austere post-war era of rationing and comparative boredom of peacetime life.He offers his services to a Black Market racketeer, Narcy, a foppish but lethal character who deals in contraband under cover of his legitimate funeral business.

Narcy and his gang are characters who just didn't appear in British films until GET CARTER came along.They are portrayed as the typical film 'cockney sparrows' of the time but with a difference-they carry flick-knives,knuckle-dusters and even guns.They listen in to the police on a huge radio set. At one point they are seen to knock out a British bobby.-you'd have to be born and raised in Britain in the forties or fifties to realise how what a shock that would have caused at the time of the film's release.

Trevor Howard's character,though,is thoroughly bad in a different way.He is a hero gone wrong,a good chap who lets the side down.When he's in a fight to the death with Michael Brennan he resorts to dirty fighting (very un-British at the time) and even head-butts Brennan.As Howard is creeping into the funeral parlour for the final confrontation with Narcy and his thugs we see a sign with the words ITS LATER THAN YOU THINK,which I believe resurfaced in Herlihy's MIDNIGHT COWBOY.

In conclusion I would like to propose that THEY MADE ME A FUGITIVE should be considered,along with Brighton Rock,Get Carter etc as a prime example of social realism in film.

Well, what have we got here?

We've got a 1946/7 London - rainy, smog- and fog-ridden - swarming with sweaty, sadistic small-time black marketeers, hag-faced toothless harridan prostitutes, rat faced squealers, slimy grasses, heart-of-gold cashmere-wearing Judys, squalid, smoky dockside boozers, and bobbies in mackintoshes and capes (told you it was raining) getting run over and bashed over the coconut.

Enter ex-RAF Clem Morgan (Trevor Howard). He wants a bit of action with a gang led by sharp, smoothie, sadistic, snooker-playing knuckle-duster wielding Narcy (Narcissus)(Griffith Jones) - but he baulks at their drug (sherbert!) dealing side. So he's framed into a cop murder - very heavy stuff in immediate post-war England. But this isn't The Blue Lamp - it's nearer Jules Dassin's famous Night and the City and precedes both.

As well as a crackling script by Noel Langley we've got a runaway fugitive we know is innocent, more bobbies, more rain, and a head-butting, knife-throwing, rooftop-climbing finale.

A great British noir sadly often overlooked. See it!

What a tight, smart movie. The only criticism I can really level at it is that it's not as good as "The Third Man," and that's only because it doesn't have the gravitas of the unconscionable criminality of Harry Lime.

It does have Trevor Howard, as one of the bad guys this time. His riveting performance as a minor-league crook is matched by Griffith Jones's as a major-league mobster. Sally Gray turns in a strong performance too as the femme fatale who, at one point, takes a beating that she withstands stoically until a girlfriend cleans her up and, finally, gives her a cup of tea. It may be that kindness, or perhaps the hot tea on her split lip, you don't know, but Gray breaks down at last and you realize what the beating has done to her.

The pace is swift, but not rushed. Extraneous but fascinating scenes are included-scenes which lead nowhere-- particularly the homicidal lisping woman and her drunken husband who shelter fugitive Trevor Howard in their house for brief but very creepy period.

Every frame is composed with extraordinary care, especially in the climactic scene in the funeral parlor, a scene that reminded me of nothing so much as "Cabinet of Doctor Caligari." There's hardly a right angle in it. The chiaroscuro photography by Otto Heller ("Alfie," "Victim," "Peeping Tom," etc. etc.) is only enhanced by editing that's almost as whip-crack as the dialog.

And as for that superb dialog: film noir movies typically have wisecrack lines, but this Noel Langley screenplay is brilliantly terse-in league with Chandler's work. If any character had two sentences in a row, I didn't notice. It's all lickety-split exchanges, and every line adds definition or motivation to the character speaking.

A personal note: This is the only film I've ever watched which, after it finished, I immediately started it over and watched it again from the beginning. It was that rich, that engaging, and that satisfying.