secondtake
They Made Me a Fugitive (1947)This is a vigorous British crime noir film, a counterpart to the great Warner Bros American movies from the same period (and earlier) and to American post-war film noir. (In fact, this was released by Warner Bros.) The plot is fast and twisty and the photography is bold and dramatic with a lot of night scenes. Great stuff. If you like this sort of thing normally you'll love this.The star is one of the Howard Brothers, Trevor, playing a would-be criminal and eventually the fugitive of the title. He's mixed up with some tough criminal types (British style) and some female leads that have echoes of film noir femme fatales. There is violence, angular camera-work, even a few special effects, and a couple of sympathetic leads who eventually take the plot somewhere new.Howard's biggest role, in the best movie of his career, came two years earlier in "Brief Encounter," and he's again complex and nuanced and someone to identify with. But he's not especially sympathetic, playing a hardened, selfish type who just happens to have a conscience unlike his cohorts. The movie follows him through several phases of his brush with crime, and with an attempt to clear his name. There is a rather long and dramatic and somewhat unconvincing fight scene near the end (the throw of the milk bottle takes first prize in this one), but the very last scene is brutally pessimistic in a way American noirs are oddly not.If you like film noir this is a must see. If you appreciate a good movie for its action and drama, likewise. There may be no deep character development are larger social arc here, but that's true of a lot of American noirs, too. So just jump and and soak it all up.
yourstruly2010
utterly fantastic gangster film from the UK, relentlessly dark and sarcastic cynical and violent with a morose sense of humour doomed pilot returns from the war to become a gangster job goes wrong is framed for murder escapes from jail to clear his name but before he gets back to the city hes framed for another murder so may as well get busy and exact some revenge while hes at it.there was a slew of these British gangster films at the time as was a reflection of what was happening in British society the gangsters much like their American counterparts made small fortunes from illegal gambling activities and selling elicit goods (in england postwar rationing meant a clamouring black market for everything from food to alchaol and strikingly this film even portrays drug dealing) not as well known as the American gangster movies but similar other films of note in the genre (known in the UK as the Spiv Cycle) are Brighton Rock, Black Memory, The Dark Road, Dancing With Crime, Appointment With Crime, Silent Dust, No Tres in the Street.
dbdumonteil
An update of Mervyn Le Roy's "I'm a fugitive from a chain gang" ,it's the same old song of the soldier who has come home to find a country where he does not belong anymore.But the cast and the extraordinary final scenes -to rival the best of Howard Hawks ("Scarface shame of the nation" ) , Raoul Walsh ("white heat")or Jules Dassin ("Night and the city") - are worth the price of admission.The tragedy ends in a funeral parlor,where "death is always around the corner" (it's written on the walls) or on a roof where men fight around giant R.I.P. letters.The very name of the undertaker's building ("Walhalla")already indicates it's a pagan movie;the conclusion bears it out: a Christian movie would have had Narcy clear Clem's name .His "May you rot in Hell" is very rare in films noirs and can find equivalents only in the movies I mention above or in Paul Muni's final line ("I steal" ) in Le Roy's tragedy.
Piafredux
Fine cast, crackling dialogue, sure-handed direction, and some lovely camera work make 'They Made Me A Fugitive' a splendid viewing experience, but the film's ripping, breathless pacing most impressed me. From the outset I just felt immersed into a cesspool of criminality, through which the pacing just dunked me again and again, deeper and deeper into the depravity of the characters. The police seem to exist in another England - the one of "bright, sunlit uplands" - while the film shoves you and binds you amid hoodlums, spivs, black marketeers, and sadistic enforcers who inhabit a claustrophobic, treacherous underworld in which violence to body and soul lurks in every shadow.At the remove of six decades some of the dialogue and action seems clichéd (although - spoiler coming here - the sequence of the fall-from-power fate of the gang leader, Narcy, socked me in my gut: it's a clever, artful, uncompromising bit of camera work); but on the whole the film still punches and lands hard blows. And, oh boy, the one character, Narcy's chief muscle-enforcer, still chills me to the bone whenever, in deliberate or unbidden recall, he lurks in and lunges from the chiaroscuro brandishing his menacing, meaty bulk, punishment-keen fists, charmless, cold, piggish face, vicious, predatory eyes, and glinting knife blade. Gives me the creeps! See 'They Made Me A Fugitive' and be swept, panting, through ninety-six minutes that seem to be counted in thunderous heartbeats that, in the underworld of this tale, may - or may not - get to go on pounding behind the thin, warm, vulnerable flesh of your chest. This one's as good as noir ever got to be.
AD
