#griffith jones

🎥 1945: The Wicked Lady stars James Mason, Margaret Lockwood, Griffith Jones, Patricia Roc and Michael Rennie.

(via Film Noir Photos: Girls Who Wear Glasses: Hazel Court)

Scarlet Web (1954) Charles Saunders

I knew almost nothing about They Made Me a Fugitive (also titled I Became a Criminal) going into it other than that it's British noir and it stars Trevor Howard. I've been wanting to watch some Trevor Howard stuff, so I was glad to find that he was in something I could watch for Noirvember. This ended up being probably one of the biggest surprises of the month for me, because this really is a stunning post-war noir with some great performances, an incredible aesthetic, and an incredibly dark, bleak tone throughout its entire runtime.

Howard plays Clem, a war veteran and former POW who takes up with a gang of criminals run by the ruthless Narcy (short for Narcissus, which might be the most on the nose character name in the history of time) when things are tough in the post-war years. But the gang is far more dangerous than he expected, and when he refuses to take part in any jobs involving drugs, the gang sets him up to take a murder rap and he ends up in prison. But when Narcy's ex girlfriend visits Clem in prison to tell him that the member of the gang who actually committed the murder on Narcy's orders is starting to feel guilty about the set up, Clem escapes to try to clear his name.

One of the qualifying aspects of noir is a film's themes and how they relate to and explore the tension and uncertainty of the war and post-war years, and I think They Made Me a Fugitive has one of the clearest voices in that regard that I've seen in noir. This is a story that is explicitly about the state of the world following the war, the way it changed the culture and brought a certain amount of violence to the surface, the way returning veterans gave so much, from their lives to their mental health, to fight for their countries only for their countries to leave them behind when the war was over, and what happens when a country trains a person to be violent and kill for them in war only to abandon those same people once they no longer need them. It's a world where the people who were already pre-disposed toward violence and cruelty like Narcy have the freedom to come to the surface and take a certain level of power, while people who were otherwise peaceful and not prone to violence like Clem were left in positions where they had few other places they could turn. They Made Me a Fugitive isn't particularly subtle about any of this, but I think that's okay. While noir can be subtle, I think it also operates well when it's something of a blunt instrument, blatantly and loudly holding a mirror up to the world left behind in the wake of a decade long depression and horrific war.

The movie is gorgeously filmed and has an incredibly strong sense of atmosphere. From its opening moments it sets up a tone that very much feels like the hopeless postwar world it takes place in. Pretty much every moment is shrouded in darkness, with the majority of scenes taking place at night and with deep shadows that fill up so much of the frame. There's great use of both wide shots that highlight the isolated position Clem finds himself in and extreme closeups to really show the intensity of what's crossing the characters' faces. And usually those closeups are during moments of more intense, unsettling emotion, when Clem has been pushed too far or when we're allowed to see the absolute viciousness that comes out on Narcy's face.

The characters are another hugely important aspect of solidifying the bleakness of the world. There really isn't a single character who acts out of pure selflessness or who helps because it's the right thing to do. When he escapes, Clem never comes across someone who helps him out of the goodness of their own heart. They're either so deeply suspicious of Clem that even though they offer help, he's unable to trust him, or they're only willing to offer help if he agrees to do something awful for them. Even Sally, Narcy's ex-girlfriend who's probably the most decent person in the story, wasn't motivated to try to help Clem out of the goodness of her heart. She was originally motivated by Narcy dumping her to take up with Clem's girlfriend. It's simple, but it's such a good decision, to have even the most decent character in the movie motivated by something that was at least initially selfish. It does so much to show what kind of world this world this is.

The performances in the movie are all excellent, but it's obviously Howard as Clem and Griffith Jones as Narcy really own this movie. Howard is one of the greatest actors of all time, despite how underappreciated he is at least in the States, and he's able to walk the thin line of keeping Clem sympathetic while not making him feel too much like a morally upstanding hero. You can tell that there's a good man in there, but that it's been buried under the crushing weight of hopelessness that serving in the war, being a POW, and returning to a country that seemingly has no place for him has left behind. There's a tiny flicker of hope that Sally's ignited in him, but even with it and the grim determination it inspires, it still feels like that hopelessness is something he cannot shake. Griffith is truly terrifying as Narcy, a true psychopath who measures up as one of the most horrifying noir villains. Whereas Clem's involvement in crime feels more like a necessity that comes from being abandoned by the country he serves and he has a clear aversion to having to hurt or kill people, with Narcy it feel pretty obvious that he's doing it because he enjoys it, right down to and especially the violence. His motivations are purely and completely selfish, and it even feels like he WANTS to hurt people, even when he doesn't necessarily have anything to gain for it.

Films Watched (1940s): The Wicked Lady (Gainsborough, 1945); written & dir. Leslie Arliss, (based on The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton by Magdalen King-Hall). Starring Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Patricia Roc, Griffith Jones & Michael Rennie.