British Crime Film: Subverting the Social Order

254 Pages·2012·1.809 MB·English

by  Barry Forshaw (auth.)

Crime Files Series
General Editor: Clive Bloom
Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never
been more popular. In novels, short stories, films, radio, television and now
in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths, prim poisoners and
overworked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine criminals are the very
stuff of modern imagination, and their creators one mainstay of popular con-
sciousness. Crime Files is a groundbreaking series offering scholars, students
and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime
and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, detective fiction, gangster
movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation is
explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive cover-
age and theoretical sophistication.
Published titles include:
Maurizio Ascari
A COUNTER-HISTORY OF CRIME FICTION
Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational
Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION
Anita Biressi
CRIME, FEAR AND THE LAW IN TRUE CRIME STORIES
Ed Christian (editor)
THE POST-COLONIAL DETECTIVE
Paul Cobley
THE AMERICAN THRILLER
Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s
Michael Cook
NARRATIVES OF ENCLOSURE IN DETECTIVE FICTION
The Locked Room Mystery
Barry Forshaw
DEATH IN A COLD CLIMATE
A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction
Barry Forshaw
BRITISH CRIME FILM
Subverting the Social Order
Emelyne Godfrey
MASCULINITY, CRIME AND SELF-DEFENCE IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE
Emelyne Godfrey
FEMININITY, CRIME AND SELF-DEFENCE IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE
AND SOCIETY
From Dagger-Fans to Suffragettes
Christiana Gregoriou
DEVIANCE IN CONTEMPORARY CRIME FICTION
Lee Horsley
THE NOIR THRILLER
Merja Makinen
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Investigating Femininity
Fran Mason
AMERICAN GANGSTER CINEMA
From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction
Fran Mason
HOLLYWOOD’S DETECTIVES
Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-boiled Noir
Linden Peach
MASQUERADE, CRIME AND FICTION
Criminal Deceptions
Steven Powell (editor)
100 AMERICAN CRIME WRITERS
Alistair Rolls and Deborah Walker
FRENCH AND AMERICAN NOIR
Dark Crossings
Susan Rowland
FROM AGATHA CHRISTIE TO RUTH RENDELL
British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction
Adrian Schober
POSSESSED CHILD NARRATIVES IN LITERATURE AND FILM
Contrary States
Lucy Sussex
WOMEN WRITERS AND DETECTIVES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY
CRIME FICTION
The Mothers of the Mystery Genre
Heather Worthington
THE RISE OF THE DETECTIVE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY
POPULAR FICTION
R.A. York
AGATHA CHRISTIE
Power and Illusion
Crime Files
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Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
British Crime Film
Subverting the Social Order
Barry Forshaw
© Barry Forshaw 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-30370-6
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First published 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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ISBN 978–1–137–00503–8 paperback
ISBN 978-1-137-00503-8 ISBN 978-1-137-27459-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137274595
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
Contents
1 A Social History of the Crime Film 1
2 The Age of Austerity: Post-War Crime Films 16
3 Class and Crime: Social Divisions 24
4 Between Left and Right: Politics and Individuals 42
5 Heritage Britain 53
6 Shame of a Nation: Juvenile Delinquents
and Exploitation 63
7 The New Violence: The Loss of Innocence 72
8 Scourging the Unacceptable: Censorship Battles 84
9 Metropolitan Murder: London 97
10 The Regions 111
11 Breaking Taboos: Sex and the Crime Film 123
12 Corporate Crime: Curtains for the Maverick 135
13 Mockney Menace: The New Wave 148
14 The Age of Acquisition: New Crime 157
15 Twenty-First-Century Hybrids 167
Appendix 1: The Directors: Makers of Key Crime Films 174
Appendix 2: TV Crime 199
Appendix 3: Crime and Espionage 215
Appendix 4: Films, TV and Books 220
Index 232
v
1
A Social History of the
Crime Film
Is it possible to read a nation through its popular entertainment?
With the growth of new critical theory, mainstream media ranging
from television soap operas to comic books have been pressed into
service as signifiers of the social and political ethos of individual
countries, notably the USA. Needless to say, however much the
illusion of verisimilitude is created by such entertainment media
as film, in the final analysis the keyword remains illusion – any
notions of reality are as false as those found in, say, reality TV –
the careful organisation, staging and editing of events is directed
towards one end: the presentation of a writer’s or director’s vision.
Any truthfulness that may appear in the interstices is usually in the
nature of a happy accident. To suggest, as this book will attempt to
do, that Britain’s long tradition of crime cinema may offer a more
nuanced, intelligent and politically informed analysis of British
society from the 1920s onwards than more overtly respectable
‘heritage’ cinema is something of a hostage to fortune – but there
is a great deal of evidence to support this thesis, as I will attempt
to show.
In many ways, the modest critical standing of much British
crime cinema has afforded it a rich seam of possibilities. Genre
cinema was for many years treated with critical disdain (consoli-
dated by the fact that audiences – while enjoying it – regarded the
field as nothing more than entertainment). But it didn’t take long
for intelligent filmmakers to utilise the language of classic crime
cinema (gangsters, robberies, establishment-baiting policemen)
in new and ingenious ways, frequently offering up a critique of
1
2 British Crime Film
society by allusion. There is an interesting parallel here with the
critical standing of literary crime fiction in Britain, which was simi-
larly afforded little respect until such writers as P.D. James finessed
the elements of psychology and characterisation first introduced
by Golden Age novelists such as Dorothy L. Sayers, with the result
that crime fiction on the printed page is now frequently reviewed
in the broadsheets alongside more ‘literary’ genres. To some degree,
there has been a parallel breakthrough for many filmmakers deal-
ing in cinematic crime, but the level of acceptance has been more
fitful. One of the principal aims of this book is to demonstrate the
myriad ways in which British crime cinema is as worthy of serious
critical attention as more self-consciously ‘respectable’ subjects.
The most straightforward-seeming of films can furnish a revealing
meta-text.
Throughout its long and colourful history, British crime cinema
has encountered a series of problems peculiar to the genre. While the
subject of the heist or ambitious robbery (in films such as Quentin
Lawrence’s Cash on Demand (1961) and Peter Yates’ Robbery (1967))
has been relatively unproblematic, there are certain areas that proved
to be incendiary when the films were examined by the British Board
of Film Censors (the name of the organisation was changed in a piece
of Orwellian rewriting to the British Board of Film Classification –
appropriately, in 1984); and it is not hard to discern the reasons for
the fuss. In the 1960s, the BBFC made little secret of the fact that
it regarded its role as maintaining the rigid status quo of society as
much as protecting the vulnerable public from sights that would
cause offence or (worse still) inspire imitative behaviour. The 1961
Joseph Losey film The Damned featured scenes of gang violence
in the original screenplay submitted to the Board and inspired a
nannyish response. Registering unhappiness with the brutal young
thugs, the Board was not persuaded by the filmmakers’ stated aim of
targeting an adult audience, pointing out that the offending sections
would appeal to ‘morons of a violent inclination’ – revealingly talk-
ing about the sort of ‘X’-certificate film patrons the Board wanted
to protect. Interestingly, this protection extended into the political
dimension, perhaps influenced by director Losey’s recent pillorying
by the House Un-American Activities Committee as part of its anti-
communist initiatives (which had driven Losey to this country –
and thereby facilitated the making of several classic British crime
A Social History of the Crime Film 3
films, such as Blind Date (1959) and The Criminal (1960)). The Board
took particular exception to the perceived left-leaning attitudes of
the filmmakers involved in The Damned (not just Losey), identifying
them as (most probably) ‘ardent fellow travellers or fully paid-up
members of the Communist Party’ (BBFC internal report, 24 April
1961).
As so often in the history of British film censorship from the 1940s
onwards, it is the potentially destabilising effect of popular cinema
that has been seen to be as threatening as any graphic violence or
sexuality (although the latter elements were clearly felt to be the
vehicle through which anti-establishment sentiment was delivered,
and crime films were firmly fixed in the popular imagination as
depicting more explicit erotic activity and female nudity than more
mainstream product). Britain’s highly successful horror films were
the target of much press hysteria (and swingeing cuts imposed before
release, with pre-censorship at the script stage), but this strand of
the popular cinema was generally dismissed as an example of the
debasement of popular culture (exploited by cynical filmmakers),
while British crime films – recognisably in settings much more like
the real world than the castles and taverns of Transylvania – were far
more subversive. The parallels with Hollywood and the Hays Code
panics of the late 1930s could not be more pronounced: as with
the Hollywood gangster movies of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart
et al., the reason given for the strict monitoring of this product was
its capacity for inspiring imitative behaviour when the gangsters
were presented in glamorised fashion. Ironically, later films in which
such charges might have had an iota of justification (Arthur Penn’s
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) or Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983)) did not
have equivalents in the classic British crime films; even the most
iconic of modern British gangster films, Mike Hodges’ Get Carter
(1971), casts a notably cold eye on its ruthless protagonist, however
charismatically he is played by Michael Caine. The ideological dis-
tance between British filmmakers and their criminal subjects was
not assessed by those who sought to neuter and homogenise crime
cinema.
In terms of chronology, the most important changes in British
commercial cinema took hold in the 1940s, with the relatively
small number of films in the crime genre made in the 1930s fash-
ioned along conventional lines. As such, this study will concentrate
4 British Crime Film
principally on the 1940s to the present day. But studying the British
crime film from the mid-1940s to the present offers a microcosm of
the events that shaped the nation, from the election of the post-war
Labour government through the subsequent shift from middle-class
drawing-room drama (and its attendant social strictures) to the new
dominance of Northern-based realist drama (which was, nevertheless,
often the product of impeccably middle-class artists such as Lindsay
Anderson and Karel Reisz). This trajectory takes into account the
changing view of class and a freeing-up of previously rigid sexual
attitudes (attitudes embraced from press to pulpit, despite the
realities of changing sexual behaviour). However, perhaps the most
significant change in perception in the post-war years was the new,
more jaundiced take on the establishment (be it the government,
the legal profession or the conventional, hidebound moralism of
the press). In this respect, the often iconoclastic impulses of popu-
lar entertainment such as the crime film could be read as a com-
mentary on the shifting sands of moral viewpoints. And while the
establishment might not always have recognised the taboo-busting
strategies beneath the surface of popular narratives by filmmakers
(usually, though not always, politically on the left), there was an
uncomfortable awareness that something was going on under the
attractive, dangerous sheen of the crime movie; less easy to target
and censor than the increasingly more overt violence and sexuality
of specific sequences, but more worrying because of its undefined
nature.
By the late 1950s, comfortable middle-class cinema was under
attack from a variety of directions. The growth of the British New
Wave (more colloquially, kitchen-sink cinema, itself a development
of the groundbreaking dramas performed at London’s Royal Court
Theatre, along with the working-class novels of such writers as Alan
Sillitoe) offered one kind of destabilisation of the status quo, but
these works frequently ended with the defeat of the blue-collar hero
(in fact, this was part of a tradition extending as far back as Thomas
Hardy’s grim fate for the aspiring protagonist of Jude the Obscure).
British crime cinema, however, offered something different: were
audiences obliged to automatically disapprove of the lawbreaking
anti-heroes in these films? Even without the moralistic impera-
tives of film censorship, it was axiomatic that criminals must be
seen to be punished – or at least not rewarded for their lawbreaking