![]() |
Trevor Howard is on the run in They Made Me a Fugitive |
Cavalcanti’s film is a marvellous mix of noir, early kitchen-sink
and faded post-war crime drama. The locations are run-down and dirty, the mood
faded and worn out. The film is remarkably bitter, cynical and short on hope.
Clem’s encounters take him past a gallery of those struggling in post-war
Britain: black marketeers, shallow glamour-pusses, bored policemen, common
criminals, vengeance minded housewives and brutal heavies. Everyone is corrupt,
has violence or treachery in mind and don’t think twice about putting others
through suffering. And to be honest, as a shambling, scruffy drunk, Clem makes
a pretty good fit among them, a man whose best days happened somewhere in
Germany in the 1940s and who hasn’t had a clue what to do with his life since.
The post-war Britain painted here isn’t nice. No wonder ruthless,
thuggish black marketeers like Narcy (short for Narcissus of all things – which
manages to be both a commentary on self-obsession, while being an abbreviation
that sounds like Nasty or Nazi) are flourishing. Narcy – played with a callous,
charismatic black-heartedness by Griffith Jones, in a performance bereft of any
trace of morality – has no problem with any criminal act what-so-ever so long
as it gets him what he wants. Smuggle drugs? Not a problem. Beat a woman? Line ‘em
up. Murder a cold-footed subordinate? As many as needed. Narcy is a perfect
emblem for this world, uncaring, brutal, sadistic and enjoying the fact that so
many others are desperate.
His kingdom is a subterranean hell, in the basement of a
undertakers. (It even has a huge sign reading RIP on the top of the building.)
His haunts are foggy docksides, chilling streets and rough pubs. His followers
are cowed former servicemen – although even they draw the line at using guns –
and the police seem unable to touch him. But then Narcy’s world is pretty
similar to the rest of England. The countryside Clem journeys through from
Dartmouth to London to get his revenge is equally fog-ridden, cold, dirty and
unattractive, full of farmers who shoot at him with buckshot and housewives who
blackmail him to carry out their dirty deeds.
The film hinges at the half-way point on this surreal scene.
Clem arrives at a home where the woman of the house – played with a sort of hypnotic
monotone by Vida Hope – allows him to
wash, gives him new clothes, feeds him – and then hands over a gun and asks him
to shoot her husband (a shambling drunk played by Maurice Denham). Clem refuses
– he’s killed once in his life, while escaping a POW camp, and has no
intentions of doing so again. He makes a run for it – at which point the woman
does the deed herself, and places the blame on Clem. It’s a bizarre scene, but
strangely magnetic – its a window into this topsy-turvy world. Killing means
something different to everyone after years of the world tearing itself apart,
and behind the chintz curtains of middle-class Britain, we can’t be certain
there doesn’t lurk something dark and dangerous.
Trevor Howard makes a perfect lead for this sort of grimy
world. He’s got the “hail well met” stance of Clem down perfectly: but he’s a
character who also carries a natural integrity to him, someone who we can
trust. No matter how drunken, shambling and untidy he gets when he’s in his
cups, there is something decent in him we can trust. It also means we can root
for him when the chips are down (which they are for most of the film), and
while he finds himself in bizarre and dangerous situations, from being shot at
by farmers to struggling to escape the curiosity of lorry drivers.
Howard powers the whole film, even if Griffith Jones perhaps
carries it away in the more colourful part of Narcy. Sally Jones makes for a relatable
woman of fixed morality (perhaps the only truly moral person in the whole film)
who has somehow found herself in a dirty world. Cavalcanti’s world is filthy.
He shoots it with a delicate but immersive intensity. It’s a surprisingly
violent film. Knifes are used, shots are fired and Narcy beats two women with a
viciousness (the first is shot with a whirling camera, which might go a little
too far to get us to relate to the dizzying violence).
It’s also a film that seems low on hope. It ends on a
downer. The forces of good – like the police – seem distant, uninvolved or, at
best, useless in the face of all the crime. The forces of evil are left to
effectively police themselves and corrupt but decent men like Clem get stuck in
the middle. They Made Me a Fugitive makes for an involving and gripping
thriller, a perfectly made little British B movie.
No comments:
Post a comment