Studying the British Crime Film

INTRODUCTION: ROUNDING UP THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Ever since its beginnings, British cinema has been obsessed with crime and the criminal: one of the first narrative films to be produced in Britain, Cecil Hepworth’s 1905 short Rescued by Rover, was a fast paced, fast edited tale of abduction and kidnap; the first British sound film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), was concerned with murder and criminal guilt; and the first ever BAFTA for Best British film was awarded to Carol Reed’s 1947 work Odd Man Out, a narrative surrounding a failed robbery and prison escape.

More recently old favourites like Sherlock Holmes (2009), Brighton Rock (2010) and The Sweeney (2012) have been remade and ‘rebooted’ for the new millennium, serving up a mixture of traditional narrative and re-invigorated visuals to eager audiences in what is a testimony not only to the longevity of the crime film but to Britain’s importance to the field.

This last point is vital to remember because, as we shall discover time and time again in this book, the basic building blocks of the crime film, its foundational texts, tend to originate from film cultures outside of Britain. The gangster film, for example is quintessentially American; the heist film gained much of its early flavour from French cinema, and so too the prostitute film; the serial killer film arose out of Hollywood and American indie cinema; the delinquent film, the 1950s B-movie and so on. Many of the sub-genres of the crime film, although successfully employed in Britain, cannot be said to belong to it.

The British crime film, then, is always a hybrid, always a symbiosis of British sensibility and foreign (usually Hollywood) cinematic conventions. However, the relationship British cinema has to Hollywood, like other national cinemas, is based on dialogue rather than domination, as indigenous film-makers bring their own cultural tools to bear on narratives and characterisations that come from elsewhere. As Tom O’Regan states:

Films circulate across national, language and community boundaries reaching deep into social space. Audiences, critics and film-makers appropriate, negotiate, and transform this international cinema in various ways. It is in cinema’s nature to cross cultural borders within and between nations, to circulate across heterogeneous linguistic and social formations.¹

Genre cinema is ideally placed to allow us to understand this process of cultural exchange due, in the main, to the perceived dominance of Hollywood forms. Unlike more self-consciously constructed anti-imperialist discourses like Third cinema or Neo-Realism, genre cinema presents a more obvious example of indigenisation, lending to the critic a snapshot of how cultural and national identity can be both negotiated and threatened through popular texts. As Marcia Landy outlines, it is a mistake to imagine that the specifics of genre are universal, as not only do different national cinemas inflect incoming generic structures with their own style and cultural lexicons, but films are inevitably influenced, constrained and otherwise shaped by the budgets, the environment and the mode of production endemic to that industry.² British crime cinema is allied to Hollywood but is endlessly coloured by other filmic histories, most obviously the long tradition of documentary and social realism in Britain, but also German Expressionism, the French New Wave and work from American independents.

British crime cinema is obviously heavily influenced by foreign cultures; however it is also inevitably shaped by indigenous histories and traditions. As Kirsten Moana Thompson states, the crime film per se can be traced back to a variety of literary sources including detective fiction, Gothic writing and gallows biographies like the Newgate calendar, eighteen century chronicles that detailed the crimes of those condemned to swing in Newgate prison.³ The antecedents of the British crime film however can also be found in sources as varied as Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the New Journalism of the late nineteenth century, Music Hall theatre and traditional folklore.⁴ In recent times, this has extended into the impact of Brutalist architecture on the collective consciousness of the nation, the influence of political figures like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair on public morality, and the prevalence of media images of contemporary folk devils such as the ‘hoodie’ and the juvenile delinquent. None of these things may be specific to Britain but their combined character shapes and characterises its cultural outputs.

The history of the British crime film, then, is dispersed throughout a plurality of other histories and traditions and the same could be said for scholarly work concerned with it. Up until 2012 the only work dedicated solely to the British crime film was Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy’s collection published in 1999.⁵ This anthology went someway to addressing the paucity of studies in this area however it is neither a history nor a considered statement on the genre. Work on the British crime film in particular can be found in texts such as Robert Murphy’s Realism and Tinsel which looks at, amongst other films, Brighton Rock (1947) and Cosh Boy (1953); Andrew Spicer’s Typical Men which contains analyses of Violent Playground (1958), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and The Criminal (1960); Charlotte Brundson’s London in Cinema; Aldgate and Richards’ Best of British and Phillip Gillet’s The British Working Class in Postwar Film.⁶ There are also substantial monographs on specific films like Get Carter (1971), Brighton Rock, Performance (1970) and The Italian Job (1969).⁷ Barry Forshaw’s British Crime Film: Subverting the Social Order, published in 2012, was the first monograph specifically dedicated to this area and covers much of the preparatory ground for its study.⁸ Forshaw’s book has a self-consciously broad definition of the crime film including works such as Sapphire (1959), Victim (1961) and The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963) as well as more canonical texts. As its subtitle suggests, Forshaw’s book seeks to trace the lines of fissures in British postwar society through its depiction of crime and legality, a mandate that the present book shares. Where the two approaches differ however is that Studying the British Crime Film assumes the best way to do this is through (relatively) close understanding of the texts themselves – what might be termed formal as well as historical analysis.

As can be evidenced from a brief glance at these titles, one of the main problems with studying British crime cinema is the proliferation of what we might think of as the usual suspects in terms of films. The iconic status of some British crime films has tended to obscure the variety and breadth of production for both audiences and critics as films such as Get Carter, The Italian Job, Brighton Rock and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels dominate what is a relatively under represented critical field. This book aims to broaden out the dragnet somewhat and to look further afield for its likely suspects. Whereas there is consideration of the more canonical texts, where possible these are discussed alongside less well-known and under-represented works and directors. The chapter on the gangster film, for example, not only considers Get Carter but also looks at Michael Tuchner’s Villain (1971), a film that has had very little written about it; the chapter on the heist movie looks at The Italian Job but also deals with Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen (1960); the chapter on prostitution outlines work carried out on Mona Lisa (1986) but also considers the 1980 Tony Garnett film, Prostitute. This philosophy has provided the basis for all the chapters presented here; if the British crime film is to be taken seriously as a genre and as an expression of Britishness, it is vital that critics and audiences alike consider the full range of texts available.

The British crime film is both highly reflective of and highly responsive to the wider social zeitgeist and changes in the physical environment. Canonically the crime film is an urban genre and therefore it is the constantly evolving cityscape that we see most obviously depicted.⁹ Films of the immediate post-war period like Cosh Boy and Appointment with Crime (1946) reveal a country still smarting from the scars of the Blitz, the urban environment is broken and the dilapidated streets are littered with rubble and bombed-out houses like the missing teeth of a post-fight smile. In the 1960s we see a noticeable change as new buildings and modernist architecture begin to emerge, by the 1970s with films like Villain and The Offence (1972) we can detect the rise of the New Towns that are dominated by concrete tower blocks and housing estates. The streets become narrower and more suburban and the narratives reflect this, as the post-war generation battles with the new world that emerged from the ashes of war. By the 1990s and 2000s the estate and the tower block become the backdrop for a host of different criminal activities from petty drug deals to urban gang warfare. The brutality of 1960s architecture, in films like Tony: London Serial Killer (2009) and Sket (2011), forms part of the internal textual debate of cinema and inextricably links it to the wider culture. The settings are more than mere narrative backdrop, they are characters in their own right; sometimes malevolent, often disturbing, they are reflections of the changing relation of the nation to itself. The rootedness of the film within its spatial environment is a characteristic of social realism and the British crime film has imbued this.

Another area that is inevitably traced by the crime film is public morality. Perhaps more than any other genre, the crime film reflects the debates that surround contemporary ethics, social mores and opinions on law and order. As Stuart Hall details, however, popular culture (which of course includes the crime film) can be viewed as a site of struggle between containment and resistance and between official ideology and counterdiscourse.¹⁰ Crime films, like the films of the British New Wave, promise political and social liberation but often fall back on a consoling conservatism where the dominance of the social order prevails and deviancy is punished. Within such generic conventions, however, are endless opportunities for subversion as characters that are outsiders by their nature challenge and question the dominant cultural norms encouraging audiences to do so as well. If, as Sarah Casey Benyahia suggests, ‘criminals are frightening and repellent but also the most charismatic and appealing characters in the story’ then the crime film can be seen to offer a counter-discourse to the dominant culture as well as, ultimately, providing a medium for its proliferation.¹¹

As well as examining the films within their cultural context this book also discusses them alongside changes in legislation. For areas such as prostitution and juvenile delinquency this is especially useful as the law not only shapes and dictates what constitutes these crimes but also reflects public opinion on how such ‘criminals’ are treated within the legal system. The narrative resolution of many films often belies the wider political ideologies of the directors and the times that they work in. The 1950 Ealing drama The Blue Lamp for example famously enacted the post-war social consensus that was also being proliferated through governmental discourse; whereas in 1979’s The Long Good Friday, we see a literal rendering of the dangers (not to mention the glamour) of Thatcherite socio-economic politics in the character of gangland boss Harold Shand who, symbolically, evokes the wrath of the ‘old enemy’ the IRA. In both examples we see how the crime film is ineluctably influenced by the wider social scene and how the surrounding political and legal position inflects the characters of the narrative.

This book, then, draws its research from four main textual areas: firstly, texts that deal primarily with crime cinema;¹² secondly, sources that deal with British cinema as it relates to pertinent thematic areas and cultural periods;¹³ thirdly, legal statutes and reports; and lastly, texts emanating from criminology and sociology.¹⁴ To add to this rather eclectic list of source material we might make mention of the various biographies and popular studies of crime and criminals.¹⁵

The varied textual base of this book not only mirrors the variety of films covered but also its methodological stance, one which is unashamedly wide-ranging in its approach. Where possible this book attempts to place the British crime film at the centre of a network of different discourses, from the popular and the folkloric, to the legal; from the socio-political to the purely aesthetic. In the main, the British crime film is a solid enough text to sustain such a multifaceted approach and yet it is one that is very rarely employed to examine it. The Hollywood crime film has been dealt with in a variety of ways, from an examination of its place as a social document to the extent that it details deep fissures in the American consciousness.¹⁶ This book hopes to do the same for its British counterpart and to view the crime film as a valuable source of information about the changing face of the nation’s taste and morals.

So, what is a crime film? Can we define its parameters, its characteristics and its tropes? Is crime cinema a genre like the Western or the musical? Does it even exist at all? These are questions that many critics have sought to answer but which most have failed to find satisfactory resolutions to. Nicole Rafter tells us that ‘crime films do not constitute a genre (a group of films with similar themes, settings and characters) as Westerns and war films do. Rather they constitute a category that encompasses a number of genres – caper films, detective movies, gangster films, cop and prison movies [etc.]’.¹⁷ Rafter’s point is well made; unlike more traditional genres, the crime movie encompasses a whole wealth of different styles of film-making and different types of narrative. If Westerns can be categorised by their semantic and syntactical elements can we really say the same of films as diverse as The Long Good Friday, The Italian Job, Performance or Harry Brown (2009)? Each of these films have different settings, mise-en-scènes and narrative arcs and yet each is also recognisably a crime film. For Rafter, the crime film can be thought of as an overall term that encompasses a whole myriad of sub-sections and types of film. The crime film, then, could be thought to exist alongside terms like the blockbuster or the comedy; categories that describe much larger canvases and are by definition porous and open to slippage.

Thomas Leitch suggests that crime films can be characterised by the interplay between three main reoccurring characters: the perpetrator, the victim and the detective.¹⁸ For Leitch, crime films explore how this tripartite relationship works and how tensions between these three dramaturgical categories are played out during the narrative.¹⁹ Crime films also contain an inherent moral ambiguity regarding illegality that, on the one hand encourage us to identify and sympathise with criminals and, on the other, to feel cleansed by their downfall in the final act. Leitch makes the point that the resolution to the crime narrative, which is usually conservative in nature, is only a feint towards the upholding of the status quo, their ultimate mandate is more seditious. Crime films offer a critique of society by inevitably painting the outsider as more exciting, more interesting and more worthy of interest than the upholders of the law. The criminals become heroes and often the authorities are seen as pedestrian and mundane in comparison.

For Leitch the crime film is as inherently subversive as it is conservative, a point also explored by Rafter, who states:

Most crime films from the earliest days of cinema have offered this dual satisfaction, enabling us to dwell, if only for an hour or two, in a state of happy hypocrisy.²⁰

Carlos Clarens mirrors this notion somewhat, however he characterises the crime film as detailing the process of ‘transgression and retribution’, suggesting again, the proliferation of the three major character types outlined by Leitch. Benyahia suggests that we might view the crime film as containing a number of different sub-genres including the gangster film, the detective film, the film noir, the thriller the political crime film and the vigilante film and to this Thompson adds puzzle films such as whodunits and heists, erotic thrillers and movies about serial killers. In his early study of the American gangster film, Colin MacArthur takes an iconographic approach, characterising the crime film as one that deals with a specific set of semiotic signs (low key lighting, screaming car tyres, screaming women, etc.) and Steve Neale suggests that the character of the crime film can be shaped by which of the three main character positions it focuses on.²¹

Research on crime cinema, especially that coming out of America, tends to privilege the gangster film and the film noir over all other sub-genres. This was a trend that began with Robert Warshow’s seminal essay ‘The Gangster as Tragic Hero’ but that we see continuing in texts like Clemens, Shadoian, and Leitch.²² More expansive studies such as Rafter’s and Thompson’s have expanded out from this to include heist films, psychological thrillers such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Se7en (1995), and films concerned with trials and the courtroom like The Pelican Brief (1993) and The Rainmaker (1997). Whereas work on the British crime film has also focused primarily on gangsters and robbery with violence, it also considers the connections between crime and the everyday; therefore we get a series of considerations of the role of the spiv in the 1940s and a wide-ranging cycle of texts that deal with women and crime.²³

The present book takes its lead from all of these studies but attempts to expand the remit even further by adding the subgenres of juvenile delinquency and prostitution to the umbrella term of the crime film. By way of foundational definitions, this book leans towards Thomas Leitch’s notions but attempts a broader base of texts than his book adopts. Although perhaps not wholly endemic to the crime film, Clarens’ notion that they also depict crime, not as an isolated incident, but as part of a larger social and ideological mandate also inflects the choices here. We see these kinds of narrative structures present in most, if not all, of the films discussed in this book but such definitions should be used with caution so that they might illuminate rather than constrain and obfuscate.²⁴

The chapters of this book can be thought to represent a rogues’ gallery of outsiders to mainstream society and, in this way, they also hold a mirror up to the social norms and mores of Britain since the end of the Second World War. There are discussions of the gangster, the delinquent, the prostitute, the thief, the corrupt policeman and, ultimately, that folk devil par excellence, the serial killer. Look in any newspaper over the past 60 years and you will find these characters being discussed, variously as bogeymen, as scapegoats and as figures of macabre fascination. Any society gets the criminals it deserves and Britain, it seems, is no exception.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

The chapters in this book are divided into sub-genres of the crime film, each of which looks at a specific criminal or behaviour. Each chapter looks at three main films usually from different periods that present the crime film as being in constant flux and renegotiation. Sometimes, as in the chapter ‘Bent Coppers’, this periodisation will be relatively small. The 1970s were the heyday of police corruption and so it makes sense to limit our analysis to this one decade; however, for the most part the space between the periods is fairly large.

The films were chosen because they represent something very definite about British society and culture. In the case of Brighton Rock for example, it is how post-war privation affected the moral underpinnings of the nation; in the case of Mona Lisa, how immigration changed the demographic of the large cities, and so on. This strategy was specifically designed to encourage the view that genre cinema, and crime films in particular, can provide useful inroads into the public consciousness and perhaps might even be a more direct reflector of contemporary ideology than the realist cinema more usually employed as a social barometer. Much of the research surrounding American genre cinema stresses the value of genre films as carriers of ideology and highlights the extent that they can be read through a number of different methodological lenses that both uphold and challenge the hegemonic norms. The British crime film is no different, yet the study of it has often been reduced to fairly narrow historical analysis.

The crime film is a major part of British cinematic culture. However, due to the prejudices that have been highlighted here, it has often been passed over in favour of its documentary or its social realist counterpart. The British crime film is also often criticised for its politics, being seen as overtly misogynistic, too gritty, too violent or too sensationalist for serious academic consideration. Especially in recent years, films like Rise of the Footsoldier (2007), Essex Boys (2000) or Kidulthood (2006) have been seen as pandering to the worst aspects of British society. Peter Bradshaw for example, in his Guardian review of the first of these films stated that ‘This fantastically boring and misogynistic movie is yet another speculative reconstruction, told from the point of view of a particularly belligerent self-pitying parasite with the face of a bulldog chewing a wasp’.²⁵

Such damning statements on a film may well be true but academic film study should not concern itself with such value judgements, or at least should consider what they mean in terms of the wider cultural field. The fact that films like Rise of the Footsoldier exist, that they are produced and are consumed for certain audiences, tells us as much (maybe even more) about the state of the nation than a more rarefied work. In other words: we must examine what is there, not what we wish might be there. However the student of the British crime film should be critical of the failings of the films where it is needed and possibly even of the audience that consumes them. A critical stance on a film like Rise of the Footsoldier, for example, might well examine its attitude towards women, its glorification of violence, or its aggrandisement of a specific brand of masculinity, but would ask the question: Why? Why was it that this was attractive to both film-makers and film audiences at that moment in time? What does this say about British cinema and Britain per se? The traditional way of dealing with such films by academia has been to ignore them and perhaps, after a hiatus of forty or fifty years, rediscover them in the BFI library and hail them as a lost masterpieces prime for reconsideration. This book encourages us not to lose sight of the breadth of British cinema and to look, finally, at the whole spectrum of British film-making, from the best to the worst.

FOOTNOTES

1.      O’ Regan, T., ‘Cultural Exchange’ in Miller, T. and R. Stam (eds), A Companion to Film Theory, London; Blackwell, 2004, p.262.

2.      Landy, M., British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930 – 1960, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991, p.11.

3.      Thompson, K., Crime Films: Investigating the Scene, London: Wallflower, 2007, p.11.

4.      Mayhew, H., London Labour and the London Poor, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010; Dickens, C., Oliver Twist, London: Penguin, 2007.

5.      Chibnall, S and R. Murphy (eds), British Crime Cinema, London: Routledge, 1999.

6.      Murphy, R., Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939 – 49, London: Routledge, 1992; Spicer, A., Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris; Brundson, C., London in Cinema: the Cinematic City of London Since 1945, London: BFI Publishing, 2007; Richards, J and A. Aldgate, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present, London: I.B. Tauris, 2001, 2009; Gillett, P., The British Working Class in Postwar Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

7.      Chibnall, S., Get Carter, London: I.B. Tauris, 2003; Chibnall, S., Brighton Rock, London: I.B. Tauris, 2004; McCabe, C., Performance, London: BFI Publishing, 1998; Brown, M., Performance, London: Bloomsbury, 2000; Field, M., The Making of The Italian Job, London: Batsford, 2001.

8.      Forshaw, B, British Crime Film: Subverting the Social Order, London: Palgrave, 2012.

9.      Warshow, R., The Gangster as Tragic Hero, in Silver, A. and James Ursini (eds), Gangster Film Reader, New Jersey: Limelight Editions, 2007, p. 13.

10.    Hall, S., Notes on Deconstructing the Popular, in Storey, J (ed), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, New York: Prentice Hall, 1998, p. 447.

11.    Benyahia, S. C., Crime, London: Roultedge, 2012, p. 1.

12.    Clarens, C., Crime Movies: An Illustrated Guide, London: Secker and Warburg, 1980;Thompson, 2007; Rafter, N., Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; Chibnall and Murphy, 1999; Cettl, R., Serial Killer Cinema: An Illustrated Guide, Jefferson and London: McFarland and Company, 2007.

13.    Murphy, 1992; Hill, J., Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-1963, London: BFI Publishing, 1986; Spicer, 2001; Leach, J., British Film, Cambridge: Cambridge University