Archive for the ‘Directors’ Category

So. Farewell then Ken Russell, senescent enfant terrible of the British film industry. He will be missed; although I was never much of a fan of his film work, he himself was terrific value, a cheerfully vulgar antidote to the insufferable self-congratulatory politeness of the British film establishment.

While he was hardly cut off in his prime, it’s hard not to rue the timing of his demise. In March, the BFI finally releases the long-awaited DVD of The Devils; it’s a shame the old goat won’t be around to savour the reaction.

There’s no-one in British film history like Ken Russell. British films are supposed to be restrained and tasteful. Even when they get down and dirty, it’s usually for respectable, political reasons (to lay bare the miseries of the lower orders and so forth). Ken Russell stuck two fingers up at all that.

For many years, his films were regarded as something of an aberration in British film, an indication of how standards in British film had plummeted in the early 1970s – a sort-of cultural equivalent of the malaise that gripped Britain during Heath’s Britain.

The official line had it that, after the ‘swinging sixties’, British film collapsed twice in the 1970s – first symbolically, when Ken Russell and his ilk were calling the shots and then (at least partly in consequence) literally; about half way through the decade, the American studios pulled out of the UK, leaving British film in the hands of exploitation merchants who steered it into the gutter – until the clean-cut likes of Chariots Of Fire, with their crinolines and well-pressed blazers, made cinemas safe for ‘nice’ people again.

And yet, start watching the films made in this country during the 1970s and a different story emerges. Dig into British film of this decade and you’ll uncover any number of good, very good and authentically great films made during this supposedly stagnant period.

Don’t Look Now, Gumshoe and O Lucky Man! suggested new horizons for British film. The Wicker Man, Death Line and Sir Henry at Rawlinson End skewer British self-image. In this context, Russell looks not like an anomaly but part of an authentic movement.

Part of the reason this decade has been so traduced is that it has been hard to see the films. With the rise of DVD, however, many neglected titles are finally getting their due. The BFI have released Radio On, Winstanley and Bill Douglas’s Trilogy; their essential Flipside imprint has revived forgotten titles like Little Malcolm, Requiem for a Village and the remarkable Deep End.

There is more. Later this year sees the publication of Offbeat, edited by Julian Upton (of this parish). It looks at overlooked British films from the 1960s onward but it is the surveys of the 1970s that are most interesting, shining a spotlight on genuinely great (if somewhat sleazy) films like The Squeeze, Sitting Target and The Black Panther.

The revival of The Devils, then, comes at a time when the films of this reviled decade are finally getting something like the acclaim they deserve. They might not have made an impact on original release but British film of the 1970s looks, in hindsight, like a time of great experimentation and excitement. Something of a golden age, then – albeit a slightly shabby one.

Cecil B DeMille liked to boast that he made the very first movie in Hollywood: The Squaw Man, in 1914. It was his efforts, he modestly claimed, that established the film colony in Los Angeles.

Like so many stories, it’s baloney – DeMille followed an established trail to California – but there’s a spiritual truth to the idea DeMille founded Hollywood: the brash, bombastic Tinsel Town is just the sort of place that the brash, bombastic DeMille might have imagined.

Always more popular with audiences than with critics, DeMille enjoys little posthumous reputation. Generally he’s only cited as an example of the worst excesses of the film industry (brash, bombastic etc). So why are we talking about him here?

Specifically, it’s because the past few months have seen a trickle of his films appear on DVD. As a fan, I want to promote them. But more generally, I think DeMille has been a little hard done by. True, his early work has its admirers. While he might not have invented Hollywood, he was a pioneer in every sense. He should be rated alongside D.W. Griffith as one of the directors who established the great tradition of American film; moreover, his films of this period are much more watchable than Griffith’s antiques and are still praised for their beauty and restraint.

But while his films were well-received, DeMille wanted more. He wanted huge audiences. So he developed a formula – approximately N x Y = $ (where n = giddy melodrama, y = garish sensation and $ = ker-ching!) – that made him perhaps the most consistently successful filmmaker ever.

How can we embrace such a shameless figure? Surely DeMille is one of the most utterly cynical of filmmakers, a puffing Victorian hypocrite who smuggled his predilection for sin and scandal into the most unimpeachably respectable material (the Bible!).

I gravitated for DeMille first as a guilty pleasure, amused by his cheerfully brazen cynicism. But I’m not sure that’s fair. You see, cynicism suggests that he was making films he didn’t believe in or that he had contempt either for his material or, worse, his audience.

DeMille’s work is so consistent and so unforced, one starts to suspect that it is an authentic projection of his personality: that these films are honest expressions and that he really believed in what he was doing. Viewed this way, the films become not cynical but perversely innocent, the statements of a born entertainer.

Moreover, many of his pictures stand up very well, especially those films he made about American history – Union Pacific, North West Mounted Police and The Plainsman are first rate potboilers, beautifully composed and tremendously invigorating. Unconquered has some questionable moments (a native American tribe led by Big Chief Boris Karloff for example) but zips along with great brio. Reap The Wild Wind might be best of all, not just for its involving love triangle but the climax, where John Wayne battles a giant squid.

These are grand operas, which might not find favour with modern tastes that favour work in minor keys; they might even be laughed at (now who’s being cynical, eh?). But if you want big, bold escapism, then our Cecil remains the benchmark. He was not a great artist. But there’s never been a better showman.

View MovieMail’s Cecil B. DeMille films

All opinions about films are subjective but there’s a type of cinema that provokes more subjective responses than most. Exact definitions are pending but for now, let’s call them ‘Spiritual’ films. For some, this is the highest, most rarified peak of cinema, discussed in hushed, reverential tones.

For others, the solemnity with which filmmakers like Dreyer, Bresson and Tarkovsky (to name three of the most conspicuous purveyors of what we’re calling Spiritual film) are treated is so much hooey. Expressions like ‘emperor’s new clothes’ are not uncommon.

These are not, then, regular films. The pace is contemplative, there is less emphasis on conventional characterisation and the concerns are high-minded: the nature of humanity, mankind’s spiritual yearnings and our relationship to the cosmos. Whew.

That’s not to say these films are opaque and impenetrable: you can dig Bresson’s A Man Escaped as a rock-steady prison break thriller and ignore the sacred stuff; his Pickpocket was inspired by (and is comparable to) Crime and Punishment but it’s also a tense little crime flick.

But, on the whole, these are films concerned more with internal states than external action. Reactions to them are, accordingly, very personal. For all that they get described as ‘cerebral’, films like Ordet, Mirror or L’Argent are profoundly visceral. It can be hard for admirers to articulate the intense reactions they describe.

This, of course, is analogous to a religious experience: those of us who’ve seen the light want to share the Good News. Normal people can’t see what we’re gibbering about, assume we’re barking mad and wish we’d go and bother someone else.

As conventional religious observance declines, these films become, if anything, more important. It’s important that non-believers and agnostics are not discouraged by the ecclesiastical overtones; the filmmakers were not proselytising. Rather, they wished to reflect on issues our species has wrestled with since the dawn of time; their musings are valid for anyone who finds themselves considering the numinous, whether they believe or not.

The best known exponents of this work have passed on but there are still major works being produced in this field. Tarkovsky’s disciple Aleksandr Sokurov makes films work equal to his master (Mother and Son for one) while elsewhere, Terrence Malick is readying a new film. His previous work has been obsessed with metaphysics – the nature of evil, of Eden and those who despoil it. (A brief aside: Malick’s most recent film, The New World, is still bewilderingly underrated. But it’s one of the very best films of the new century.)

Newly released on DVD in the country is The Island, a Russian film concerning a monk with a troubled past who might be able to work miracles. And there’s a welcome re-issue for Carlos Regadas’ remarkable Silent Light (pictured above). True, Reygadas hasn’t quite transcended his influences (chiefly Tarkovsky, although there’s a prominent nod to Dreyer) but there are moments – an immersive sequence in a water hole, a stunning opening and closing shot – as good as anything you’ll ever see and the cumulative effect is overwhelming.

It’s possible to take our devotions too seriously, of course – we should never forget how valuable honest entertainment and escapism is. And some folk need no more. But if they ever do, these films are here for them.

If John Huston hadn’t existed, would Hollywood have been able to invent him? Writer, director and one charming sonofabitch: if even a fraction of the stories about him are true, he’d still be one of the greatest buccaneers of the past century. (My favourite story involves Huston, Robert Mitchum and a monkey. But it’s hardly suitable for a family film website.)

Although the nominal catalyst for this column is the welcome re-release of The African Queen, the fact is that Huston’s life and career are just so damn tempting to write about that we could return to him every few months and still find new things to say about him.

But let us be disciplined and start with The African Queen. After all, it is a tremendous film. The stories about the production are (almost) as much fun as the film itself – for example how everyone but Huston and Humphrey Bogart contracted virulent amoebic dysentery, largely because the director and his star eschewed water in favour of whisky.

Legend has it that the only reason Huston made the film in the first place was because he wanted to bag an elephant. Even if that’s not true – and the consensus seems to be that it isn’t – it says much about the man that so many thought he was capable of it.

The African Queen is so relaxed, so effortless that some have described it as a happy accident. But if one surveys Huston’s filmography, one encounters any number of films that are equally relaxed and effortless. So many happy accidents, in other words, that it starts to look deliberate. You can file Beat the Devil and The Man Who Would Be King next to The African Queen on your ‘most purely entertaining films EVER!’ shelf, films brimming over with fun and high jinx.

And yet, we do Huston an injustice if we characterise him as little more than a purveyor of polished frolics. Do not ignore the shadows that hang over even his brightest works – the anti-colonial critique of The Man Who Would Be King is as fierce as anything in The Battle of Algiers (a critique that would have been all the more acute if he’d been able to get it made in the 1940s, as he’d hoped – with Bogie and Clark Gable as Caine and Connery).

Huston made some of Hollywood’s darkest films – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre dissects greed and American rapaciousness so sharply that it’s no wonder it inspired There Will Be Blood. In the seventies, Huston directed two films – Fat City and Wise Blood – that lifted a rock on aspects of American life that the movies traditionally prefer to ignore.

Huston’s great mentor was Howard Hawks and both directors share the same restless versatility, although Hawks was always more of a creature of the studio system, less willing to take risks than his protégée. True, Huston’s wanderlust led him in some strange directions – such as Annie (!) and Escape to Victory (!¹ººº) but it also resulted in work that looks better with every passing year.

As more of his films become available, you can rest assured that Huston will feature in this column again. Maybe then I’ll tell you the story about the monkey…

It goes without saying that filmmakers make poor role models. Artists are fallible human beings, after all: picture people more than most. Their faults (be they moral, political or temperamental) are usually intensified by the money, power and opportunity swirling around the movie business.

Even though this is demonstrably none of our business, there are those – serious, reputable critics – who argue it is important to know these things. Not to trade gossip and tittle tattle (fun though that is) but because the way an artist lives influences their work.

Take Nicholas Ray: the more you find out about his catastrophic private life, the more you wonder what inspired his interest in self-destructive characters. Was the delusional drug addict of Bigger Than Life a self-portrait?

It’s a seductive argument (especially when dealing with outlaw directors like Ray, Sam Peckinpah or Fassbinder), allowing us to assert, once again, the central tenet of the auteur theory: that (with obvious exceptions) films represent a personal statement by the director.

I certainly believed it once. But now? I’m not so sure. For a start, directors are liars. That, of course, is what they’re paid for but some go above and beyond the call of duty. Few directors let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Fellini was the most famous example – he was amused by the way critics related his films to a biography he’d largely fabricated – but many Hollywood old timers were equally guilty. And many auteurs cheerfully claim credit for the work of their vital collaborators.

Beyond this, however, it’s vital that we make clear distinctions between the work and its creator(s), for fear that our opinion of one may tarnish or distort our opinion of the other. Astute reader that you are, you will already have spotted where this is headed: to a Californian court room by way of the Swiss jail cell which has played home to Roman Polanski for these last few months.

Polanski is an excellent test case. He has suffered more than most – tormented by the Nazis and the Manson family – and for many amateur Freudians, this darkness finds full expression in his work, as though it was as simple as cause and effect.

He is amongst the finest of filmmakers (if you haven’t seen Chinatown recently, watch it again soon. You deserve it) and yet his behaviour leaves much to be desired: whatever legal chicanery is being played out around his present difficulties, no one is disputing that he’s guilty as charged.

Unlike those admirers who believe his art somehow excuses his behaviour – surely the natural, if fabulously wrong-headed, consequence of eliding the art and the artist – I need to separate my admiration for the films from my distaste at what he did.

Art is a complicated thing. Biographical explanations offer convenient, tidy and, above all, easy explanations. But the best artworks resist such reductive approaches: part of the attraction of a masterpiece is the new facets you discover with every fresh encounter.

It might even be better to disregard the director entirely – our near-total ignorance of Shakespeare arguably improves our appreciation of the plays. The egomaniacs in Hollywood wouldn’t like it but what matters is the film, not who made it.

It’s always a pleasure to review a film as good as F.W. Murnau’s City Girl. Indeed, the only difficulty is fitting in all that you want to say: In addition to the remarkable use of light, Murnau’s rare ability to imbue simple stories with universal significance deserves at least a nod..

But there’s one thing that can’t be overlooked: the similarity between City Girl and an earlier Murnau film, Sunrise. Oh, that’s not to say City Girl is a ‘remake’ but in outline, the two films are so similar – very broadly, a meeting of rural and urban values – that comparisons are inevitable.

Murnau was a restless, inventive director who previously seemed keen to tackle new subjects with each new picture; what was it that lured him back to the scenes of his greatest triumph? One of the great fascinations of City Girl is the way is compliments – and contrasts – Sunrise; a director critiquing his own work.

And Murnau was far from alone in this. Obviously, the greatest directors – the auteurs – have themes and obsessions that recur throughout their work. But some take it further, crafting films that reflect on their other movies.

Sometimes they made light of it; Howard Hawks would routinely recycle bits of business, characters – hell, even entire films. His stated motivation was that if it worked once, it would stand repetition. A double bill of Rio Bravo and El Dorado proves him right, as well as being a fantastically entertaining way to spend an evening.

Hawks’ compadre John Ford pretended any similarities between his films were purely unintentional but this is unconvincing; consider the late period film Two Rode Together, in which a pair of cowboys pursue an Indian band to rescue white children captured in a raid. The echoes of The Searchers (in which a pair of cowboys etc etc) are overwhelming but while that film is a mournful elegy, Two Rode Together is brutal and cynical. It’s vital documentation of Ford’s growing pessimism.

One of the most interesting of these ‘mirror’ films is The Passionate Friends. Having already made arguably the definitive ‘woman-contemplates-leaving-her husband-for-Trevor-Howard’ film – Brief Encounter, obviously enough – David Lean was surely not obliged to make another. Lean claimed circumstances obliged him to take over the production from another director but he had been actively involved as producer. Was he, in fact, keen to intervene? The Passionate Friends is a most worthwhile melodrama in its own right and a rewarding riff on Brief Encounter.

When Roman Polanski’s film The Tenant was first released, it was dismissed as a repetition of his earlier Repulsion – both are about people slowly going mad in their apartments. Now it looks like one of his finest works and the links to the previous film seem quite deliberate. The titular tenant even ends up in a long blond wig, a la Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion – which is actually quite disturbing, since he’s played by Roman Polanski himself.

Their individual motives differ, of course. And maybe we shouldn’t read too much into it – maybe inspiration is thin on the ground in Hollywood. But then again, Van Gogh painted dozens of sunflowers and no-one accuses him of lacking inspiration. And for some of us, Murnau is an artist of the same calibre.

This month brings the long awaited release of Lola Montès, the final film directed by Max Ophuls. I’m sure it’s quite unnecessary to add to the small mountain of praise already piled up, but if you are hesitating about ordering then consider this a nudge. You’ll never regret a masterpiece: they’re good for the soul.

Ophuls is one of those directors always discussed in hushed, reverent tones. There are those who make a convincing case for his 1948 film Letter From An Unknown Woman as the greatest film of them all, while others favour his penultimate film Madame De… He was the primary influence on Stanley Kubrick, who admitted the celebrated tracking shots in Paths Of Glory and The Shining were inspired directly by him.

No one moved the camera like Ophuls. His films are symphonies of movement, with the camera circling the actors or sweeping airily across the set. James Mason, who worked with Ophuls twice, wrote a verse celebrating his friend’s love of motion:

A shot that does not call for tracks / Is agony for poor old Max / Who, separated from his dolly / Is wrapped in deepest melancholy.

But while Ophuls was a stylist without peer, it is the substance of his films that makes them so great. These are films filled with passion, heartbreak and unrequited desire. He identified with tragic heroines punished for transgressing the prevailing social order, such as the notorious courtesan Lola Montez, reduced to trading on her notoriety in a circus show. Love, the source of happiness in other films, can be destructive in Ophuls’ world, with many affairs of the heart ending in tragedy.

(A brief digression: it’s tempting to draw comparisons between Ophuls and his near contemporary, the great Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi. Both are celebrated for their facility with the camera, both showed enormous sympathy for the travails of women. Were they are aware of each other’s work? One could construct a fascinating parallel retrospective… End digression.)

No matter how lionised Ophuls is today, however, it was a very different story while he was alive. The reason we’ve had to wait so long for Lola Montès was because it needed to be restored: it was recut after a disastrous preview. Preservation was an afterthought. And that is hardly an isolated example. His Hollywood films, now considered amongst his finest, were often ignored: Letter From An Unknown Woman was only released in Britain after a vigourous campaign by Gavin Lambent and Lindsay Anderson of Sequence magazine. It still flopped.

In his lifetime, Ophuls was regarded as a mere decorator of films: good with the camera, yes, but a maker of melodrama rather than the proper, serious films that won awards and acclaim. That changed with the young critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, with Jean-Luc Godard especially vocal in his admiration.

Ophuls, then, should stand as a cautionary tale of how genius is not recognised in its own lifetime. (And before we start smugly tutting at our blinkered forebears, let’s be aware that future generations will surely shiver at some of our decisions.) We might wonder how such beauty could be overlooked, but let us be grateful it exists, then embrace it as it deserves.

One of the great problems of being an admirer of the ‘Old Hollywood’ directors is that they were so prolific. The likes of Hitchcock, Lang or John Ford cranked at least a film a year and frequently more. No problem if you were around to see them at the time, but something of a headache for those of us trying to catch up fifty-odd years after the event.

Thank heaven for DVD. Films that were screened infrequently – if at all – are now available at the flick of a mouse. The situation still isn’t perfect – I’m not holding my breath for a UK edition of Hitchcock’s Waltzes From Vienna (his only musical!) – but compared to what it was, this sure looks like a golden age to me.

Every month brings fresh obscurities: this month, for instance, sees the release of two films directed by Otto Preminger: The Fan and Rosebud. Neither enjoys a reputation as one of his major works but it’s worth asking whether that’s actually a reason not to seek them out. Because one of the consequences of actually being able to see all these films that conventional wisdom dismisses as ‘minor’ is that I increasingly question conventional wisdom.

For many years, the only way most of us could experience these films was at second hand: to absorb the opinions of those few people who’d actually had the opportunity to catch them. And since they were broadly right about those films we had been able to see, we trusted their judgement. Now that DVD has given me the chance to make up my own mind, the picture looks rather different.

For example, the consensus on Hitchcock was that, of his early work, only The Lodger, The Ring and Blackmail mattered. Yet I’d happily trade all three for The Manxman (pictured above), a beautiful melodrama and (arguably) his first masterpiece. I’m not sure if I should be angry that the film was ignored for so long or delighted that it’s freely available.

John Ford was even more prolific than Hitch, so its perhaps understandable that some of his work has slipped through the cracks. One such is Wagon Master. In fairness, it was always well liked but never got much attention. Now it’s as easy to see as The Searchers or Stagecoach, it seems at least their equal.

We can broaden this out beyond Hollywood. If you avail yourself of the Kenji Mizoguchi films released by Masters of Cinema (and I hope you don’t need my prompting for that), you’ll find they’ve double-billed each ‘major’ film with a lesser-known effort of similar vintage. These second films are no mere added value: Uwasa No Onna and Gion Bayashi happily hold their own against their better-known brethren.

Not every film can be a revelation, of course and sometimes conventional wisdom is bang on the money (or understates the case: if you’ve yet to endure Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!, take a tip from a friend – life’s too short.) And maybe most film fans aren’t such trainspotters that they need to see every last frame by a favourite director – if you’re not, good for you.

Personally, I’d say it’s less about completeness than it is about finding great movies. And DVD has shown us that there are more of those than we even suspected.

It’s David Lean’s centenary this year and although the anniversary itself was in March, the BFI are celebrating with a jamboree of revivals and retrospectives. What better time to consider his career?

But then I realised I had nothing new to say. The standard critical line on Sir David is that the early films were wonderful, the later work bloated and self-important; “when a director dies, he becomes a cameraman”, as Pauline Kael had it. Oh, I can refine it slightly (my rule of thumb is: ignore Lean’s colour films, although I’ve a fondness for Summer Madness) and I can mount a spirited defence of Ryan’s Daughter (horribly miscast, madly overblown yet brilliantly written by Robert Bolt, and concluded beautifully). Those aside, my opinions are entirely orthodox.

What I’m more interested in is what those opinions say about the critical caste. Because for most folks, it’s the later Lean they love. To use a personal example: my Dad loves Bridge on the River Kwai. Doctor Zhivago might be his favourite film. I’ve watched both with him and in both cases there were two different films playing: I couldn’t see the stirring masterpieces he was watching, he couldn’t see the pomposity that irritated me.

This division between popular taste and critical values is most regularly glimpsed in the foul reviews most Hollywood films attract in the daily press but these are bad examples: it’s surely inevitable that a film aimed at teenagers will attract a frosty response from the curmudgeons who write movie reviews. Lean is a much better case study; the enduring popularity of his ‘big’ films exposes the gulf between mainstream opinion and the critics.

It’s worth pondering why there can be such divergence between those who write about films and those who are content just to enjoy them. My suspicion is that the two sides watch films in different ways. When you’re obliged to write even a short review of a film, you have to consider how you’re going to fill the blank page that’s waiting for you after the end credits. Saying that it was ‘cool’ or it ‘sucked’ won’t cut the mustard: you need to explain why.

Inevitably, this means you’re more aware of your relationship to what’s on screen. Far from taking you out of a film, I find it makes the experience much more intense. But it means you’re more aware of empty spectacle and sensation, hallmarks of the later work of David Lean.

Of course, that’s only my opinion. It’s not holy writ. No need to get steamed up about it if you don’t agree. That’s the point of criticism: it’s subjective. Crucially, however, criticism explains how it reached its conclusions. When you start having to do that, you start thinking a lot harder about what you’re watching and you’ll be judging movies by a different standard.

Having concentrated on division, let us end with harmony. For this is the centenary of that great director David Lean. Not that we need excuses to revisit Brief Encounter, Great Expectations or Oliver Twist, one of the greatest of all films. But it’s an ideal prompt to watch lesser-known work like The Passionate Friends or Madeleine. They remind us how wonderful movies can be – and on that, I hope we can all agree.

The 26th of May is something of a red-letter day in the DVD release calendar. Whether this is because of a conjunction of the planets in the far-distant heavens or some sinister international conspiracy of art-house DVD labels, I don’t know. But whatever the reason, there’s a whole bunch of films released that day which are surely of interest to the discerning sort of person who shops at MovieMail.

For instance, Masters of Cinema release Akasen Chitai + Yokihi, their final double bill of late-period Mizoguchi films (any chance of some early ones, gents?) The BFI drop four films. First, the long-awaited (by me, at least) release of A Cottage on Dartmoor. Then there’s A Walk With Love and Death, a John Huston project rescued from limbo and happily restored to polite society.

You can – and frankly should – also get your hands on Lubitsch’s final masterpiece, the droll delight that is Cluny Brown. And then there’s another long-awaited (by me etc etc) British film, Radio On. Last year’s Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – harrowing, outstanding – is made available by the good folk at Artificial Eye, while Tartan give us Chan-Wook Park’s I’m a Cyborg (But That’s OK.) And I haven’t mentioned collections gathering work by Paul Verhoeven and Andrzej Wajda. Nor things like Bandit Queen. Phew!

If that were everything, it would be a good week indeed. But there’s more. Right at the bottom of the page is what might be the pick of the litter: They Made Me A Fugitive. Not, perhaps, the most celebrated title but one that really does deserve to be better know. Even if it were not a good film (which, incidentally, it is), it would be of interest because it’s directed by Alberto Cavalcanti.

As the name might suggest, Cavalcanti wasn’t from round these parts. Born in Brazil, he arrived in Blighty after a spell in France working with the likes of Renoir. He threw his lot in with the documentary movement – he supervised Night Mail – before being headhunted by Ealing Studios to work for them. His most widely seen work is Dead of Night – he handled the linking scenes and the best story (Michael Redgrave and his dummy) but it’s Went the Day Well that is the masterpiece.

I included Went The Day Well on my ‘alternative’ list of best British films last year but frankly, it deserves to be hovering near the more orthodox accounts of our national cinema too. (Incidentally, I wanted to include Radio On on that list but it wasn’t available on DVD at the time of writing. Now that it is, it can take the place of The Offence.) It’s an astoundingly brutal film considering it’s supposed to be a wartime morale booster and it made me a Cavalcanti devotee.

They Made Me a Fugitive isn’t quite as brutal, or rather, its brutality manifests itself in different ways. It doesn’t have the same inexorable forward momentum as Went The Day Well; the pace is just a little more relaxed. But more even than its predecessor, it has contempt for the politeness of British cinema and little hypocrisies of society. It’s an unflinching film: women are beaten, drugs are smuggled (at least I assume it’s drugs, not actually sherbet, as the gang-leader claims). The police aren’t infallible.

And for a film made in 1947, it offers a very unflattering portrait of the home-coming heroes. Trevor Howard is the titular ‘Me’: Clem Morgan, ex-RAF, ex-POW and finding it hard to adjust to life on civvie street. He drinks too much; he misses the excitement – so he gets involved with the titular ‘They’: some nasty black-marketeers.

But Clem isn’t totally without scruple, which rubs the headman Narcy (Griffith Jones) up the wrong way. Narcy’s also taken a shine to Clem’s lady-friend, so when a copper gets killed during one of their raids, Narcy frames Clem and lets him face the music – breaking rocks on Dartmoor – leaving Narcy free to make his moves. Naturally Clem escapes, and revenge is high on the agenda.

What’s most remarkable about They Made Me A Fugitive is just how close it is to the contemporary American crime films that would subsequently become known as Film Noir. We often talk of British Noir – Brighton Rock, Odd Man Out and the like – but while they share certain common elements with the American films, their concerns are ultimately different. They Made Me A Fugitive is the real thing, something that’s in sympathy with the aims and ambitions of the very best Noir. It could have been produced by RKO or Monogram.

Except, had it been made in America, I dare say the production code might have had a few suggestions to make about the film. I can’t imagine they’d be too happy about the grim vignette in which Clem shelters with a woman who begs him to kill her alcoholic husband. And they’d have probably exploded when they saw the conclusion, which openly laughs at the conventions of the happy ending. To say more is to spoil it but it’s safe to say that you won’t predict the ultimate resolution.

As an outsider, Cavalcanti saw a different Britain than the natives. Coming from the documentary tradition, he was interested in telling the truth as he saw it. This is a very squalid Britain, sordid and grim. Indeed, I can’t think of another film from that era – or even for another a couple of decades – that showed this country in such a bad light; it paints a very different portrait of austerity Britain than we’re used to.

It’s a tough picture, pretty much the diametric opposite of the film that made Trevor Howard’s name, Brief Encounter. It’s enough to confirm Cavalcanti as a major filmmaker, one deserving of much more attention than he currently receives. I’ve seen very little of his work (which spanned three continents, at least) but even if the rest is bobbins, he made at least two bona-fide masterpieces.

I don’t doubt that there’ll be a shed load of titles in your shopping basket on May 26th but if you’ve got room for one more, then it’s only £7.99. It’s not much to see a master at work.