They Made Me a Fugitive

Cavalcanti's film-with its hints of Brecht's Three-Penny Opera and Dickens' Oliver Twist-seems to insist that the society emerging from the "Great War for Democracy" was spawning more than its share of money-hungry, fascistic thugs.

A postwar British noir film; revenge being the theme.

After WWII, "Clem Morgan" (Trevor Howard) returns to little opportunity in wartorn Britain, so he hooks up with some hoodlums. When one of their robberies goes wrong, his new "friends" frame him for the killing of a policeman and to prison he goes. He escapes, and bent on revenge the film follows his efforts to get back home and to settle the scores. Howard was never the most natural of actors, I always found him just a little too sterile, but he acquits himself well enough here with a couple of decent performances from Griffith Jones as his nemesis "Narcy" (as in Narcissist) and Sally Gray as the conflicted ("Sally") as well as a solid supporting cast with the aptly named heavy Peter Bull, a drunken Maurice Denham with his resentful wife Vida Hope and Ballard Berkeley. This story is tensely directed with plenty of mini-escapades en route to keep it interesting. The fight scenes are a little bit over-staged and the ending is really quite a stretch to the imagination - Howard's skill at weaponising milk bottles borders on the comical, but the rest of it is well paced and a good watch.

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