Night and the City (1950) begins with a hunted man running through the deserted, darkened spaces of a city at night. This is a nightmare landscape, a place of shadows and hidden threat, and one which throws us instantly into the world of film noir. However, we are not in New York’s mean streets, film noir’s most familiar setting. A voiceover announces, ‘The city is London’, and, as the fugitive pauses to catch his breath and looks fearfully over his shoulder, we see the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral behind him.

While film noir is mainly identified with Hollywood cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, it has

a long and international history. Noir drew on interwar German and French film, and its subsequent influence can be seen in numerous post-war national cinemas, in films from Spain, Egypt, Japan and elsewhere. In each case, film noir conventions are inflected by specific national contexts.

They Made me a Fugitive

This talk will look at British film noir, focussing on films with a London setting. I will consider how the city is used as a spectacular stage for Night and the City, or with a sense of documentary-style realism in noirish moments of The Blue Lamp (1950). While these films mostly adopt film noir’s visual conventions, there are some significant thematic variations, especially in relation to gender. The emblematic figure of the femme fatale is largely absent, with much more emphasis on charismatic but dangerous men, as most famously seen in The Third Man’s Harry Lime. I will also look at the recurrent theme of psychopathic masculinity, in such films as Obsession (1949) or The Upturned Glass (1947).

Noose

I will discuss how widespread anxieties about a postwar crime wave can be seen in the figure of the spiv who reoccurs in many of these films, as a brash comic turn in Noose (1948), or a vicious gangster in They Made Me A Fugitive (1948). I will also look at Noose’s representation of Soho as a place corrupted by crime and sexual exploitation, reinforcing its sleazy image at a time when a radical redevelopment was being considered as a way of sanitising and modernising the district.

Adrian Garvey is a film historian who did his Phd on the career of James Mason

Please note this is going to be a Zoom webinar. You will be able to ask Adrian questions and post your comments through the Q&A.

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