Sigh... I was telling myself I wasn't going to write another long write-up, but lo and behold, this is the longest yet. If I can offer an excuse, there is a surprising lack of criticism for this film, despite being in my estimations a landmark British film of its era. Yes, its foreign, but it's one of two foreign films I have no qualm whatsoever calling
film noir. It will more than likely crack my top 10, and while this post is filled with
spoilers, and I am not recommending it for people who haven't seen the film, hopefully the large block of text it inspired can be a testament to some of you of the film's greatness.
They Made Me a Fugitive (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1947)
A Pulp Story
Viewing this film so soon after the Anthony Mann noirs, it is easy to note the similarities between Cavalcanti’s film and
Raw Deal. Even conceding that the scenario for both films is hardly original – the archetypical premise on which dozens of revenge films have been hung – there are still striking similarities. The basic premise: a framed man breaks out of prison, traveling cross country to the heart of a city, straight into its underworld, evading both police and thugs, so as to get revenge on a ruthless gangster. The leads in both films are obsessed criminals, morally ambiguous, psychologically unhinged, holding on to a shaky code of ethics which seems to contain an unspeakable capability for violence which threatens to break loose at every turn. In both cases, the leads force their way into the life of an “innocent” girl, ensnaring her into his dilemma, and putting her into mortal danger. Both films work in a similar environment, a world of dangerous alleyways, claustrophobic dives, vicious thugs and unending night. Both Mann and Cavalcanti are unflinching and unapologetic in representing the violence and degradation that is currency in that world. Even the heavies are alike: dapper, effeminate, pseudo-sophisticated, both Rick Coyle and Narcy carry a dandyish affectation that contrasts sharply with the world they lord over. In both cases, that affectation is quickly shed in displays of shocking, often misogynistic violence, which both they and their henchmen take sadistic glee in. They even meet similar fates. And in both films, the final showdown takes place in a setting imbued with “otherworldly” characteristics: the impenetrable fog and hellfire of Corkscrew Alley, the “Valhalla” funeral parlour.
Yet, it is this latter point where we can begin to mark some of the difference between the two films. While
TMMF may not be as insistently flashy as
Raw Deal, both films are handsomely shot and baroquely lit. Alberto Cavalcanti and his DP, Otto Heller, had direct roots in the French Avant-Garde and German Expressionism, and the influence isn’t lost in this film. Yet there is also an influence of the horror film which links both films, despite the fact that the manner which it manifests clearly demarcates them. In
Raw Deal, it is the sense of the supernatural, those foggy, shimmering images which create an almost romantic haze which engulfs the film. In
TMMF, the influence is of a much more macabre, more sinister variety, menacing instead of romantic, shadings rather than a haze, manifesting itself in a continuous series of
memento moris which makes us feel that death and decay is lurking around every corner in Soho.
To attempt defining the difference, and finally leaving Mann’s film behind, the influence of horror is used in
Raw Deal to give the fatalistic pull of fate a tangible presence. It’s invocation in
TMMF is different and much more subtle, if just as effective. Although the film commences with a coin toss, fate is not Cavalcanti’s main concern. Rather, the morbid undercurrent driving the film creates a sense of unease and anxiety, almost a feeling of the
diseased, as if the entire the characters and their city, if not the entire country itself, had been struck with some terrible, incomprehensible malady. Intangible, indescribable, the atmosphere is nonetheless felt, engulfing every crevice of the film, agitating the city into a frenzied death dance.
After the War…
This atmosphere and what it means was already being perceived at the time. From Arthur Vesselo’s period review (“The quarter in Britain,”
Sight and Sound n63 1947):
Arthur Vesselo wrote:"[Morgan is] an unconscious personification of decent humanity demoralized by war and unfitted for peace… [The film has] an unpleasant undertone, a parade of frustrated violence, an inversion and disordering of moral values, a groping into the grimier recesses of the mind, which are unhealthy symptoms of the same kind of illness."
While the review was negative, meant as a condemnation of
TMMF and its other “spiv” contemporaries (
Appointment with Crime,
Brighton Rock,
No Orchids for Miss Blandish), it nonetheless perceives the general mood which make the films so interesting, and for which
TMMF stands out as an especially tremendous example. It is points clearly towards
film noir. Perhaps the greatest foundation for
noir – moreso than American nationality or even black-and-white photography – is the influence of the war. To put it in the simplest form possible, the war unleashed something in society. A contact with violence and death: on a personal level, with the soldiers (and abroad, civilians) who saw the carnage of war first-hand, and discovered their own capacity for killing. On a greater, more abstract level, in the societal knowledge of the war’s violence, perhaps best personified in unfathomable monoliths like the Holocaust and the Atomic Bomb. It also caused a great and violent shuffling and re-shuffling of society that was felt by both soldiers and civilians. From this, it is easy to postulate where the frustration, alienation and trauma of
film noir emerges from. Perhaps this social shift is most obvious with women, the misogyny of the
femme fatale linked with a backlash against the short moment of relative independence for women (and its no mistake that the next great wave of sexist cinema would emerge in the 1980s, after the decline of second-wave feminism).
The importance of this description also points towards the difficulty of establishing parameters for
film noir. While it has certain recurring themes and narrative motifs,
film noir isn’t unified by a clear narrative and thematic cohesiveness the way the Western or Horror film is. The private eye and the
femme fatale may be important to
noir, but they alone don’t make a
film noir, and there are plenty of
noirs lacking both that testify that the inverse is true. You must also account for the way
film noir often uses other established genres (gangster films, detective films, romantic melodramas, etc.). It would be more appropriate to call
noir a
stylistic genre, but that also ignores the way many of the technical properties of
noir find their way into other sort of films, and the wide difference of form between certain
noirs (the studio-bound slickness of a
Big Sleep, the low-budget gloom of a
Detour, the docudrama realism of a
Kiss of Death). Perhaps the best way to classify
noir – a method which almost precludes any chance of objective definition – would be as being united by a mood, a feeling, an intangible presence which for a lack of a better word could be called a
sensibility, and while ineffable, can be classified by several number of characteristics: violence, cynicism, sexism, perversity, aimlessness, guilt, moral ambivalence, darkness, to name only a few (and now we see the wisdom in Borde and Chaumeton’s deliberately vague definition). And it is this
sensibility that points back to the war. It is rarely explicit – while
noirs could use the war as plot devices (
Somewhere in the Night), and sometimes even bring it front and center (
Act of Violence),
film noirs rarely included Post-War films as explicit as
The Best Years of Our Lives, and most
noirs don’t even mention WWII, yet the same sensibility hangs over the entirety of the cycle. It often manifests itself in guarded cynicism, sometimes gives way to pure existential terror, and in rare cases, like
Kiss Me Deadly and
The Seventh Victim, collapses a film into nihilistic oblivion… but the sensibility was always present.
From here, it is easy to see why an argument for
foreign noir is at least worth considering. The war was a global event, and every country was touched by it, so it stands that many countries can capture something of that post-war sensibility. Of course, any definitive argument for
foreign noir would have to consider the way the post-war atmosphere differed from country to country, the way it was represented on each respective screen, and the manner in which Hollywood style and narrative influenced international cinema (and the way world cinema sometimes influenced Hollywood). I’m not here to make that study – I don’t have the patient, intelligence or stomach – but even the strictest
noir purist must concede that films like
Drunken Angel and
Quai de Orfèvres at least express
parallels with American
film noir. Any potential
foreign noir would have to have careful individual consideration, contrasted against the American
sensibility, and seeing how the film compares. Ultimately, it comes down completely to subjective definition, and I don’t hide it. The final chase of
The Third Man may be
noir in its style and desperation, but the film surrounding seems to me clearly to placed in the espionage film, and its viewpoint, a British view of Vienna, strike me as being “twice removed” from the American
sensibility, as fundamentally different from
noir as Anton Karas zither is from Rozsa’s strings and Mancini’s sleaze jazz. An argument
for a film like
Rififfi is easy: Dassin’s certified noir credentials infuse the film with the genuine tenor and tempo of American
film noir.
TMMF creates a more difficult argument: while Cavalcanti may have been an “international” filmmaker, his globe-trotting missed any work in Hollywood, and any links with American filmmaking that can be made, such as Noel Langley’s work on
The Wizard of Oz, seem tenuous at best.
TMMF is worth considering as
noir in the manner that it fulfills the three foundations of the genre – narrative, style, sensibility – in a manner that speaks less of a cross-Atlantic pollination than a mirror image that developed “independently” of its Hollywood counterpart, but presenting a direct analogy that withstand the differences of context. It shares a violent, hard-boiled scenario equally at home in the American cinema, as a comparison with
Raw Deal shows. Its style is the same Expressionist darkness of the American
noir, representing the urban city as a nightmare. Most important, it shares the
sensibility, showing that even our allies weren’t immune from our own post-war trauma. It has differences, but none strong enough to clearly demarcate it from American
noirs, and some of them even serve as the perfect compliment to some of the worst excesses of the American genre (such as Cavalcanti’s sympathetic portrayal of women characters).
Like most American
noirs, the influence of the war is essential, but understated, couched and buried within a pulp “entertainment”. Nevertheless, it doesn’t go unmentioned. Like the various
memento moris that constantly pop up around the edges the film, casual references to the wars pop up throughout the dialogue, undercutting the post-war anxiety of the film. Starting from the beginning, where Narcy (Griffith Jones) describes the yet-to-be-seen Clem Morgan (Trevor Howard), lingering on his status as a former RAF, and explains: “
He's got class. We need a bit of that in our business.” The conflict of the film hangs on the conflict between Morgan and Narcy. Their initial conflict revolves around that old standby dilemma of British Society – class – but the manner in which class is complicated and refracted by the reality of the war is especially of note. Morgan is a middle-class man “slumming” in the criminal underworld out of boredom. Narcy is a lower-class, but showing a clear desire to “climb” in his ostentatious outward appearance, and criminal ambitions. Morgan is a soldier, spending the war years fighting. Narcy is a “spiv”, spending them at home, capitalizing on the ration system, and building a small criminal empire. Despite his middle-class status, it is Morgan that looks and acts the brute, unkempt, with a wild gleam in his eyes. Narcy, on the other hand, is lithe, composed and self-consciously elegant. As one character describes him, he isn’t “
a respectable crook… just cheap, rotten after-the-war trash.” While a throwaway line, it marks the characters relation to the war: Narcy stayed and prospered on that very societal shift which now leaves Morgan, who left and fought, unable to assimilate back into society.
One of the great strengths of the film is Trevor Howard’s performance, possibly his best. Sardonic, obsessed, doing justice to the script’s razor sharp wit, yet seemingly always on the verge of spinning out of control, it may at first glance seem against type, but a closer examination reveal quite the opposite. Howard himself fought in the war, fighting in Sicily, Nazi-Occupied Norway, and ultimately being kicked out after being diagnosed with a “psychopathic personality”. Some accounts tell that he was a last minute replacement, making his command of the character all the more impressive. If one can indulge in psychology, it seems possible that it may have been a much more personal performance than the more regal, capable officers he’d play in later films. While I’m not as familiar with Griffith Jones career, beyond seeing him play “the Baxter” in several romantic dramas, does justice to another possibly uncharacteristic role. He captures the sociopathic sadism hiding behind a veneer of smirking, self-satisfied smugness which belies the root of his name – short for Narcissus. It has other connotations as well, no more felt than its nearness to certain British pronunciations of “Nazi”, which points towards a post-war constant: the external war abroad usually returns an internal war at home (“
I went on doing what the country put me in a uniform to do after they'd taken it back”), that very internal tension being the subject of the film.
This is the “
inversion and disordering of moral values” that Vesselo perceives and objects to. Since this disordering includes by extensions “social values” as well, one could perhaps give the film a “classist” reading. The entire conflict arises from people stepping beyond their class – Morgan “slumming”, Narcy “climbing” – that a superficial reading can be that the post-war trauma is simply class confusion. Yet this neglects that the film doesn’t ascribe any moments where class “normalcy” prevails. The closest the film comes to a sympathetic symbol of the middle-class is Inspector Rockliffe (Ballard Berkeley). While not a negative portrayal, the character is largely ineffectual, often unscrupulous – as when he allows Morgan to escape, so as to “
buy two nooses for the price of one” – and at others, impotent – he knows Morgan is innocent, but is completely unable to do anything about it. Beyond this, there is another major exception that proves the rule: when Morgan escapes from prison, he forces his way into a well-to-do middle-class home. It’s an interesting moment for two reasons – it is the only real moment placed squarely in the middle-class, and the only home outside the city we see as well. However, the way the scene plays out hardly speaks for middle-class idealization. On breaking in, Morgan holds a housewife, Mrs. Fenshaw (Vida Hope), at gun point, forcing her to provide him with some clothing. Instead of showing any resistance, the woman immediately figures out who he is, and offers to help well beyond what Morgan is forcing her to do. She makes no attempt for escape or alarm, promising in fact not to, her acquiescence accompanied by an almost somnambulistic detachment. Throughout the episode, she prods the fugitive about his war experience, especially keen on the issue on whether he ever killed a man, and if so, how did he do it. When he finally offers up an answer (“
With a beer bottle. It's alright...it was empty”) she reveals what she has in mind: to repay the favor of clothes, bath and food, he wants Morgan to kill her husband, seeing no harm in him being charged with another murder. She even has the gun ready, suspiciously at hand considering she had no reason to expect a visitor. Morgan balks at the idea, even giving her a final admonishment before escaping through the window: “
It would be better for you to forget these maternal ideas. Otherwise, you could end up worse than me.”
You half expect the scene to end here, a nice little anti-crime message to appease the censors. Yet, the scene sticks with her even after Morgan leaves. She eyes the gun, realizing that Morgan touched it, and as such has his fingerprints. She picks it up with a handkerchief and slowly stalks up the stairs. Half way up her husband meets her. She pauses for a second. We expect her to drop the gun. Instead she fires square in his chest. He tumbles down the stairs. It doesn’t stop. She follows him down and unloads the gun with a fury that surpasses that of Bette Davis. She fires until the gun is clicking on empty rounds. Then the scene ends. Given the already morbid underpinnings of the film, the scene still stands out as an especially creepy and disturbing moment of the film. That it seems largely extraneous to the rest of the narrative gives it an odd sense of agitation to boot. Yet, its purpose seems simple: while the movie concerns itself with slums and lower-class hoods, it clearly marks that the middle-class, even those beyond the city, aren’t immune to the post-war malady afflicting the film. One could perhaps read a sexist bent here, a manifestation of the
black widow/
femme fatale, but her ice-cold demeanor surpasses pure viciousness and enter the realms of the psychopathic. Even the short glimpses we get of the husband – a absent-minded, seemingly harmless drunk, but a drunk nonetheless – point towards some level of dysfunction, and perhaps the invocation of
The Letter wasn’t accident. The story of woman trying to justify a murder, it could act as shorthand for all the possibilities of abuse or trauma that could drive her to do such an act. Even then, the viciousness of the act and the insanity exhibited by the crime seems to surpass any hints of a back-story. It isn’t the justification that Cavalcanti is worried about, it’s acknowledging the fact that the mark of violence unleashed by the war touches all strata of society, even that of middle-class normalcy and comfort.
A Woman’s Nightmare
A sexist reading of the Mrs. Fenshaw character also ignores that throughout the rest of the film, Cavalcanti is understanding and sympathetic to his female characters. The cycle of films that can be classified as “
British noir” never indulged in the
femme fatale to the extent of America – just look at the wide-eyed innocence of Rose in
Brighton Rock, or Alida Valli’s Anna in
The Third Man – but
TMMF is interesting since it has several roles that could have easily been
femme fatales, at times even seeming to set up a character as one, only to requalify it later. Beyond Mrs. Fenshaw, who is only peripheral to the narrative, there are four major female characters:
1) Ellen (Eve Ashley): From the outset, she seems to be tagged as the main female character. She is Morgan’s girl, but once he is framed, is stolen by Narcy. We expect the revenge film to shaded by jealousy, and for the cheating Ellen to be the callous and opportunistic
femme fatale. Yet, she seems to largely vanish after the opening. Throughout the first half of the film, people’s belief that Morgan is jealous is contrasted by his own clear disinterest in Ellen’s love life. Even before he’s framed, Morgan catches on, and instead of reacting with jealousy, is content allowing her to have her romance “
as long as we understand eachother.” Morgan’s revenge has nothing to do with Ellen, and he nor Cavalcanti have any interest in punishing her.
2) Sally (Sally Gray): As Ellen disappears to the background, it is Sally who emerges as the true female protagonist. Yet she makes her entrance in full
femme fatale fashion, as Narcy’s jealous ex-squeeze, looking for revenge, she visits Morgan in prison in hopes of sowing seeds of discontent. She tells her that Ellen has left him; that one of Narcy’s henchmen who was witness to the framing, Soapy, knows he is innocent, feels guilty, but is to afraid to testify; and is hoping to help him escape to dish out the revenge she is hoping for herself. Yet, Morgan immediately notices what it takes a few scenes for us to figure out: that she’s no
femme fatale, but a
femme naïve, and that she has no comprehension of the sort of fire she is playing with. Two scenes later, she receives a vicious beating from Narcy, and sheds any romantic notions of revenge, beginning to understand she had no idea about the sort of people she was dealing with, and while
they may be vicious and sadistic brutes,
she is anything but. When she reenters the story, it is only after Morgan pulls her back in, forcing her by gunpoint to assist him, and “
finish what [she] started”, while she would rather walk away from the whole thing. She’s is not the great manipulator of American
noir, but a sympathetic character who is ultimately at the mercy of the more vicious men around her.
3) Cora (René Ray): In many ways, it is Cora that is the most sympathetic character in the whole film. Like a younger, British version of Thelma Ritter’s Moe in
Pickup on South Street, she’s a frail, tattered woman, exhibiting a weariness beyond her years, yet revealing a cunning street-smart which belies her ability to survive at the margins of society. She is linked to Narcy’s gang via her husband, but when we first see her, it is obvious that she has very little to do with that side of his life. And that gangster is Soapy – the weakest-willed member of the gang, exhibiting none of their cruelty, and the only one to feel guilty about Morgan’s framing. In many ways, she is the only character in the film having anything resembling a noble cause: Morgan’s escape makes Soapy the prime chess piece in the struggle, and she spends the film doing everything she can to hide and save his life from the gangsters. It is she who warns Sally about getting mixed up in their affair, as she understands something that Sally doesn’t yet: these men’s capacity for violence. This knowledge and perseverance isn’t enough to save her from it, and Cavalcanti never betrays anything but compassion for her.
4) Aggie (Mary Merrall): Probably the most peculiar character in the film, and the hardest to pin down. She is clearly some “part” of Narcy’s gang, always lurking around them. Nevertheless, she isn’t a hood; she has some sort of role between den-mother, soothsayer and comic relief, trading pointed barbs with the hoods, and holding down the fort. Nevertheless, it is she who expresses qualms about the final showdown with Morgan, having a premonition that it will be doom for everyone and that she wants to wash her hands of it. And Cavalcanti never expresses anything but amusement with her.
If I can borrow a phrase from Robin Wood,
TMMF presents itself as being something of “a woman’s nightmare.” The main narrative thrust of the film revolves around conflict among men, but the manner in which that conflict constantly draws in and damages the woman around it is always visible. The film presents a world where women exist only to be marginalized, possessed (Ellen), discarded, abused, humiliated (Sally, Cora), or at best, quietly put up with and ignored (Aggie). Cavalcanti draws attention to the pattern, but never indulges it. In fact, the entire middle section of the film revolves around two moments of misogynistic violence.
First is the moment alluded to above, where Sally is brutalized by Narcy. Before the scene, Cora warns her about tangling with him, but she responds confidently that he would never dare touch her. That false confidence is quickly shed in the next scene. After the first blow, her underestimation becomes clear, as she seems already broken and resigned. But Narcy ensure her that there’s more, and the full extent of what’s in store sets in. Moreso than any other scene in the movie, Cavalcanti’s
avant-garde roots become clear here. Taking in the violence that’s in store for her, she looks into her dressing room mirror, and it has taken on the properties of a funhouse mirror, distorting Narcy, arm extended to strike the next blow, into a monstrous figure. The scene is cut with a furious pace that would have made Epstein or Gance proud, and he utilizes various tricks – distorted lenses, whirling camera – to capture and identify with Sally’s bewildered position as victim. Certainly the other scenes of violence are no slouch, but the amount of energy Cavalcanti puts to this scene shows he holds this act as especially abberant. Adding to the helplessness of the situation is that Cora is situated right outside the door. Fully aware of Narcy’s nature in a way Sally was not, she doesn’t dare intervene. She, like the viewer, stands as a powerless witness.
Later, another moment of violence against women occurs. Cora has been capture by Narcy’s gang, and she is being interrogated and tortured to reveal her husband’s location. Yet, unlike the earlier scene, this one isn’t marked by psychical violence; here’s the brutality is strictly psychological. When we enter the scene, Cora’s hair is tussled, her face is bruised, showing she’s already been worked over, but except for a slap at the beginning of the scene, and some rough pushing, there’s hardly a blow in the scene. It is rather the threat of unthinkable (and unfilmable) violence that is used to break Cora down. Unlike the furious pace of the other scenes, this is one is drawn out, more methodical. The camera lingers on the various elements; Cora’s hysterical fear, Narcy and his gang’s gleeful crave for violence, the implements of torture waiting to be used, the almost dungeon-like quality of the room (the horror element). The main focus is on the “coaxer” – a large leather belt (which in itself seems deadly) studded with heavy, razor sharp medallions that look like they could tear the flesh. The threat reaches a palpable level of tension, until it seems like it can only be alleviated by either violence or a confession. In the middle of this scene, Cavalcanti uses two uncomfortable and jarring close-ups that drive home its cruelty: a low-angle shot looking up at a smirking Narcy, describing the “game” which they are about to play; a high-angle shot looking down on Cora, with indescribable terror in her eyes. At a moment where we want to camera to stay far back, for it to turn away if possible, Cavalcanti brings the camera close. At a moment where we do not want to look at either characters – so as to not see either Cora’s degradation or Narcy’s sadistic joy – he puts the camera right up to their faces, in fact having them make eye contact with the camera/viewer. Both close-ups are also p.o.v. shots – Cora looking up at Narcy; Narcy looking down at Cora – making literal the power relations (brutalizer and victim) of this sadistic and shameful display. Some could read identification with the act from this, but I don’t think it’s so: the brutalizer’s gaze is matched by the victim's, and like the earlier scene, it is complicated by Sally, who stands by this time as the powerless witness. It walks a fine line, but the scene ultimately takes no sadistic glee from the scene, but maintains a sensitive position towards Cora. When she ultimately confesses with nary a scratch on her, it doesn’t seem like a moment of cowardice, it seems completely comprehensible, never losing sympathy. In fact, the moral implications – a betrayal – makes it seem as terrible as the kicks and punches Sally received earlier. Cavalcanti’s method is not prurience, but making clear the terror of women at the mercy of men.
Between these scenes, there is another moment of a gruesome nature, which unlike the others, is perhaps the only moment of physical affection between women and men in the film. During his escape, Morgan was shot by a farmer, and has been walking around with buckshot in his back. When he holds Sally captive at gunpoint, he makes her remove the buckshot. It’s a potentially bloody scene: without anesthetic, Sally removes the shot using only tweezers. Yet the scene is shaded with romantic overtones. Morgan is shirtless, lying on Sally’s luxurious bed, where Sally sits with him. The scene plays out completely in intimate close-ups. The CU’s initially capture the uncomfortable dimensions of the scene – Sally’s queasiness, Morgan’s flinching pain – and plays out in exchanges of sneering wisecracks. But something interesting happens here. Placed in context, this scene is the moment where Sally’s feelings towards Morgan passes from fear to begrudging camaraderie. Before it, she is held at gun point, terrified at the man. Following it, she voluntarily helps him escape Narcy and the police. While something of a romance develops later, it is never consummated with a kiss or even a real embrace. As such, this scene act as the film’s only “love scene”. Certainly, it’s a perverse simulacrum – and given the film’s inherent black humor, something of a parody – but a love scene nonetheless. When it’s over, we find that Morgan is out cold, literally passed out from the operation, but the film frames him in a way that makes him look like a spent lover postcoitus.
That a moment of “violence” here can be restructured into a moment of “romance” is worth examination. This is achieved be reversing the power relations of the interaction. Here the “violence” is used not for torture, but for healing; throughout the movie, people constantly try to fill Morgan with bullets; here, someone tries to remove them. There is also a reversal of gender roles. For once, the woman is in the dominant role, allowed to be in control. And control is an apt word, for despite his precautions, Morgan is taking a giant risk turning his back on Sally, placing himself in a vulnerable position, and as we see, risking passing out in front of his hostage. That this scene is never followed up with a genuine love scene, however, adds to the
diseased tone of the film. In this world, men and women can only relate in terms of violence and power, and even in its most positive representation, it can only subvert the model, not transcend it. (Note: it would be remiss to ignore the Cora and Soapy relationship, but I feel while it adds some complicating information, it still supports this tone. Here, Cora is also the dominant one, and the strength of their love seems to come from being united as
victims.)
Frustation & Futility
Compounding the tone of brutality and decay, there is another intangible feeling emerging from the film that is difficult to put into word. Certain scenes, quite typical taken on their own, are staged and arranged in a manner that makes them ring intentionally hollow. Early in the film, Narcy and his gang attempt to abduct Sally, and in pure fate, arrive just as Morgan is with her. As luck would have it, before any confrontation or capture can occur, we discover the police have been watching Sally’s apartment, and they intercept Narcy before any thing can occur. Feeling confident about this, Morgan leaves her in police custody as she makes his escape. The police attempt to protect her, but Narcy’s gang finds a way to outmaneuver them, and seize her. None of this sounds especially noteworthy in itself; it’s all quite typical of this genre of film. Yet, all this action is not spread out; it occurs all in the same scene, in a span of a few minutes. The suddenness with which Sally is left in protection, and with which Narcy’s gang is able to infiltrate it, drives home the feeling that Morgan’s (and the police) best attempts at protecting Sally were ultimately naïve and inadequate, a far cry from the clever, obsessed man we saw escape from prison. To find Soapy, Morgan must find Cora; but when we finally come around to Morgan searching the back alleys of Soho for her, it is after she has already been captured and forced to confess. Once again, the cunning man finds himself dozens of steps behind his adversaries, who are now on the path to hunting down Soapy. Right after this, Morgan finds him recaptured by the police, but there is no chase or struggle as we would think perfunctory for this sort of film and this sort of character. It is rather uneventful; Morgan turns a wrong corner, and literally walks into them, giving himself up quietly without a fight. When Soapy is finally tracked down and murdered, it occurs during this stretch of the film when Morgan is incarcerated, and Narcy feels comfortable enough to restart daily operations. While a necessary piece of the conflict, his murder occurs at the one moment where he is most unnecessary. It feels as if he almost dies in vain, for no reason except machinations that were already in place and too late to stop. When Morgan is allowed to escape, it is only when there is no hope for acquittal left, all that remain is pure revenge. While it may seem that Cavalcanti is almost attempting to make the gang all-powerful, constantly able to outsmart Morgan, I don’t believe this is true. They are hardly omniscient, often prospering out of pure luck, and often capable of folly as much as anyone else. Rather, the ways these and other scenes play out suggest an overriding feeling of frustration, as if the simplest actions can’t be carried without the possibility of them being opposed or undone. And futility, as if all this violence and madness ultimately amounts to nothing.
The ending is the ultimate examples of this. The elements of the horror film have been used throughout the film to generate a sense of unease and sickness. Here, it comes out to the forefront. It is played out in the Valhalla Funeral Parlour, and is accompanied with numerous
memento moris: caskets, coffins and other implements of the trade; ornate statues of angels and gargoyles; comically grotesque advertisement posters; black framed signs containing darkly humorous maxims about death. To add to the effect, Narcy has his men lie in wait inside the coffins, so when Morgan arrives, they pop out in ambush like vampires or mummies. Despite taking place in a small room, the darkness of the room turns the parlour basement into a condensed labyrinth, the piled up boxes and casket creating multiple corridors around which assailants can creep and hide, creating a sense of disorientation. At one point, while chasing Narcy through the roof window, Morgan becomes so mad with rage, he doesn’t even bother raising it; he smashes through it head first like some classic movie monster. The final rooftop showdown is the home of the film’s ultimate
memento mori: the acronym “R.I.P.” stands emblazoned on it in a huge sign, Morgan and Narcy’s final struggle taking place around its giant letters. As Morgan and Narcy square off, we see that the police are finally arriving.
It can hardly be called a happy ending – either one where Morgan triumphs and gets the girl, or where the police reinstate law and order – although both instances are certainly at play. It doesn’t even have the catharsis of a tragic ending – where Morgan’s destroys himself with his drive for revenge – although in its subtle implications, it is as bleak and distressing as any tragedy. Rather, Cavalcanti ties up the story in a way that is fitting for a pulp genre film, but exacerbates the ending in a manner that emphasize the frustration and futility of it all. The film manages to have closure, but like the earlier scenes, it rings hollow, unable to shake the feeling of death and decay permeating the picture. Narcy dies, but it can hardly be called revenge. It happens by accident, Narcy slips while leaping across an alley and fall to his death (the pure chance of it perhaps an answer to the opening coin toss). In fact, when it happens, Morgan himself is clinging to the roof banister for dear life. The movie sets up the possibility of Narcy confessing his guilt and Morgan’s innocence as he is dying. Instead, in one final sneer, he implicates Morgan and only Morgan, using his last breath to tell he and Sally to “go to hell.” The police swing into the building, but the most they do is scrape the remains off the floor; Inspector Rockliffe knows he is innocent, but is left helpless without any proof. He offers some reassuring words about an appeal, but the dispirited tone with which it’s delivered, and its hints of bureaucratic red tape, betrays it as an empty gesture. When Sally confesses his love, and tells him she’ll wait, there is no great kiss or embrace; Morgan simply says that it is “
what [he’s] afraid of,” and advises her to give up the notion. For once, it doesn’t sound like a romantically stoic gesture of sacrifice, like Rick in
Casablanca, but a genuine warning from a broken man resigned to his fate.
The film ends with one of the great final moments in all of
noir cinema. As Marius-François Gaillard’s haunting music plays, the police car pulls away, carrying Morgan with it, leaving Sally behind alone on an isolated, rainy street corner. We have a close up looking in on the backseat as Morgan turns around, a man defeated by circumstances, a hollowed out shell of the intense character we have seen throughout the picture, all his energy and vigor drained. Returning to jail, he is no better than when he escaped on his quest for revenge. In many ways he’s worse off: the obsessive drive for revenge animated him, gave him something to live for; now even that is gone. As he stares back, we catch his p.o.v. shot: a wide shot of Sally standing alone on the rain-soaked, gas-lit street corner, as the car/camera moves further and further back. She isn’t simply an object of longing and loss. In many ways, it is her ending as much as Morgan’s, and in many ways, she isn’t much better off. She has gained knowledge of a cruelty in the world she was ignorant of before; she has suffered and been abused. And she has very little to show for it at the end either. Not happiness, nor love, nor solace. In many ways, it is appropriate to end with her and not Morgan. We know where Morgan is going. She, like the society she lives in, like the viewer who’s stolen a glance into this world, stands on a street corner, trapped in indecision, paralyzed in heartbreak and uncertainty, not knowing which direction to go.
Despite being British, the world of
They Made Me a Fugitive is quintessentially
film noir – it’s a world defined by the unresolved traumas of the past, and the terrifying uncertainty for the future. A world consumed by corruption, crime and violence, where the best that one can hope for is reaching a point where he/she has nothing left to lose… but nothing left to live for either. Its ending weaves the same mix of ambiguity, disillusionment and immeasurable melancholy that mark the finest
film noir denouements. It is the same crushing sadness we find in
In a Lonely Place, when Dix Steele walks out of the apartment courtyard a broken man. It is the same ambiguous melancholy we see in
Out of the Past, when The Kid lies to Ann so as to save her from the destructive pull of the past. It is the also the same guarded and hesitant sigh of relief we get from Marlene Dietrich’s eulogy at the end of
Touch of Evil: the nightmare of the story may be over as the lights come up, but we get the feeling that the scar and ruins will remain long after the camera turn away.
Don't let the country of origin fool you. This film is the genuine article.
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While my "write-up" keyvip is almost becoming as taxing as my "to-watch" keyvip, I like to mention some of the films I'm hoping to write on next (certainly much less than I did here). If anyone has any thoughts on the films, I'd appreciate musing over them as I write:
Act of Violence,
In a Lonely Place,
The Seventh Victim,
The Prowler,
Moonrise,
Voice in the Wind,
Ride the Pink Horse... and of course, try to hit all the swapsies.
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tojoed wrote:I doubt whether there are many others that you might have overlooked, but I'll have a think and let you know.
You'd be surprised by how many glaring absences I have, a side-effect of going for the esoteric instead of the obvious (for example, I've missed most of the Preminger and Siodmak noirs, yet have spent years searching for (and fingers crossed, finally found) one of Arthur Ripley's lost noirs). Shoot a few, and you'll probably hit.