Alberto Cavalcanti (1947)

It sounds American rather than British (there’s a 1939 Hollywood movie called They Made Me a Criminal, directed by Busby Berkeley and starring John Garfield).  So does the source material – A Convict Has Escaped, a novel by Jackson Budd.  This is a very conscious attempt at British noir, with ‘hardboiled’ dialogue by the scenarist Noel Langley and most of the action set in a deeply-shadowed cityscape.   The words issue awkwardly from the mouths of the cast.  The actors point up lines that should be thrown away and the vernacular – strained through underlying received-pronunciation voices – is often ridiculous.  (Locutions such as ‘Whip it quick’, ‘Keep yer ruddy gob shut wontcha’, ‘He don’t come here no more – now ‘op it’ don’t benefit from an elocuted delivery.)   What makes the film absorbing and exciting is the odd marriage of these elements with Alberto Cavalcanti’s macabre imagination, and the performance of Trevor Howard as the fugitive of the title.

Set immediately after the end of World War II, Fugitive is a striking follow-up to Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well?   The villagers of Bramley End were fighting to preserve the British way of life.  Here – in the aftermath of victory, in a bleak, black-market London – the characters are already lamenting the country going down the tubes.  Clem Morgan (Howard) had a good war as a RAF pilot but is drawn into the criminal world because he can’t find a decent job on civvy street.  It’s Clem’s innate sense of honour, even so, that leads to his being framed for killing a policeman and sentenced to fifteen years for manslaughter.  During the war, Morgan was shot down over Germany and escaped from a POW camp.   When he breaks out of peacetime prison and goes on the run, his efforts seem doomed to failure not because he’s certain to be captured but because the outlook looks grim even if he stays on the outside.    While the social themes are interesting, they need Cavalcanti’s melodramatic intensity to bring them to life.   With the help of the director of photography Otto Heller, Cavalcanti gives the streets an expressionistic life of their own – the low-angle shots and the glistening, oily sheen of the images make us feel we’re looking at the very fundament of London:  the drains might be suppurating.  The gang of black marketeers led by the dandified psychopath Narcy (short for Narcissus) operate from the Valhalla funeral parlour and Cavalcanti relishes the deathly paraphernalia – the coffins, a looming poster of a widow’s face, especially the giant letters RIP on the rooftop where Morgan and Narcy have their climactic fight to the death.

Some  passages are remarkable, not least in terms of the frankness of the violence meted out to women – Sally (Sally Gray), the heroine, and Cora (René Ray), the girlfriend of the member of Narcy’s gang who really killed the policeman whose death Morgan is jailed for.   When Narcy (Griffith Jones) hits Sally in the corridor of the theatre where she works in the chorus line, it’s shocking, after he’s knocked her to the ground, that he kicks her.  (Her injuries from this beating are improbably minor.)   The film really started to grip me when Morgan, on the run in Devon, breaks into a house.   Appearing through the French windows, Trevor Howard cuts a slightly comical figure and, when the strangely undisturbed lady of the house, Mrs Fenshaw (Vida Hope), starts talking with him, her posh, dead-sounding voice has at first the same effect.  Yet her unchanging face and tone throughout their encounter, which culminates in her asking Morgan to kill her blotto husband, is weirdly gripping.  (When Morgan refuses and takes his leave, Mrs Fenshaw does the job herself.)   Morgan later describes this woman as ‘Mad as a hatter’ – with feeling.  You understand how unnerved he’s been by the experience:  he broke in expecting to startle the occupants of the house and ends up spooked by them.   This seems a typical, vividly disorienting Cavalcanti touch.

It’s complemented by a fine, nuanced sequence in which Morgan, after making it back to London, goes up with Sally to her room and she removes pieces of lead shot from his back.   If Narcy’s assaults on Sally and Cora are surprisingly brutal for the time, this later scene is a good example of the dividends of avoiding physical explicitness.   When she gets to work with her tweezers, the camera stays on Sally’s face and we share her amazement that Morgan doesn’t seem even to flinch.  When Cavalcanti cuts to his face, we get a very different picture.  Sally Gray, who elsewhere seems very limited, comes to life in this scene and Trevor Howard is superb.  Morgan doesn’t really speak until, in one of the script’s wittier moments, he starts saying, ‘She loves me … she loves me not’, as the pieces of shot come out.

The distinctive, dated performance style probably enhances They Made Me a Fugitive as a period piece in the view of Ealing aficionados yet I can’t believe this acting isn’t bad.  If it were, as some people think, ingeniously stylised, why are those who can deliver a different (better) kind of acting allowed to do so – Ballard Berkeley as a police inspector, Maurice Denham, in a brief, brilliant appearance as the hapless Mr Fenshaw?    Trevor Howard, as soon as he appears, is so much stronger and easier a presence than anyone else that he seems to have come from a different planet.  Howard makes you feel how deep Morgan’s bitterness goes.   You see it in his eyes behind the mesh of his prison cell.  When, at the end of the picture, Morgan’s on his way back to jail and Sally tells him she’ll wait for him no matter how long it takes, Howard’s ruefully dry reply (‘That’s what I was afraid of’) is very moving – at this moment, Morgan badly needs his sarcasm to restrain the feelings he’s developed for the girl.

Howard’s physicality animates Fugitive and he knows how to vary his delivery so that he (alone here) makes the most of lines by speaking them casually.  Griffith Jones over-elaborates Narcy’s malignity:  he’s eventually effective only because his and Howard’s acting styles are so different – that serves to reinforce the polarisation of the hero and the villain they’re playing.  Narcy’s acolytes may be laughable when they open their mouths – it’s probably to Sam Kydd’s advantage that he has no lines – but the gang members are a successfully grotesque collection of faces and bodies.  Mary Merrall’s enjoyment in playing the sharp-tongued harridan Aggie, the only woman in the gang, is occasionally infectious.  Music by Marius-François Gaillard; editing by Margery Saunders.

29 July 2010